During the Exhibition, the Studio Will Be Close
14 June–17 August 2014
WIELS
Avenue Van Volxemlaan 354
1190 Brussels
Belgium
Hours: Wednesday–Sunday 11–18h
T +32 (0) 2 340 00 53
Curator: Lorenzo Benedetti
Assistant Curator: Caroline Dumalin
Artists: Melissa Gordon, Lina Viste Grønli, Rob Johannesma, Aukje Koks, G. Küng, Cathérine Lommée, Emmanuelle Quertain, Grace Schwindt
During the Exhibition, the Studio Will Be Close is the title of the second episode of a recurrent commitment made by WIELS to connect its former artists-in-residence to its exhibition programme. Since the creation of the residency programme in 2008, it has welcomed over 70 international residents.
“When the public visits the exhibitions at WIELS, there are, in the same building, artists who are at that moment creating, researching and elaborating new projects. The exhibition space becomes the studio’s alter ego, or, conversely, finds itself in a situation of proximity that is not purely symbolic. The importance of the relation between studio and exhibition space is delineated in a process that multiplies the individual moment of the studio and displaces it into a collective dimension. In this sense, every work made in one’s individual and intimate studio is a prospective projection towards the exhibition spaces.
The artist’s studio is a place of perennial reflection on the state of art, a place to elaborate and transform what happens in the exhibition space, which, for its part, wants to fix a particular state of art by showing the contents of the artist’s studio. This dynamics is evident at WIELS, which, in a way, affects also the identity of the institution, in which research becomes the common denominator between these two spaces.
And so it happens that, on the one side, we work to fix and establish for the public new art canons, while on the other is a transformative process that calls the very gesture of fixing and establishing into question. The studio here is not simply a space, but the consequence of the active process of mining the precarious stability of the formulations issuing from the exhibition.”
—Lorenzo Benedetti
Complementary programme
6 August, 19h
Film programme on artist’s studios
17 August, 17h
Finissage with barbecue
Also on view in WIELS
Allen Ruppersberg: No Time Left to Start Again and Again
Until 17 August
Robert Heinecken: Lessons in Posing Subjects
Until 17 August
Rossella Biscotti: For the Mnemonist, S.
Until 17 August
Press contact
Micha Pycke
micha.pycke [at] wiels.org / T +32 (0) 2 340 00 51 / M +32 (0) 486 680 070
