Goshka Macuga: Figures of Absence
May 14, 2021 – May 1, 2022
Stadspark, 2018 Antwerp
Ken Lum: Time. And Again.
June 4 – September 5, 2021
Cockerillkaai, 2000 Antwerp
The Antwerp Public Art Collection (Collectie Kunst in de Stad) is a municipal arts and heritage organisation tasked with the development, research and conservation of the city’s collection of monuments, statues and other artworks in public space. This collection spans five centuries and includes over 250 unique objects, including 19th-century statues, modern and contemporary artworks, and commemorative monuments to the first and second World War as well as Belgium’s colonial history. These monuments are the subject of current and ongoing investigation and reflection. The Antwerp Public Art Collection commissions new permanent artworks across the city, but also programs temporary projects that challenge and expand our understanding of art and public space in today’s western European urban realm.
Team: Lucie Bausart (collection manager); Samuel Saelemakers (curator); Sara Weyns (director, Middelheim Museum)
Goshka Macuga: Figures of Absence
For the second iteration of commissioning series Public Figure, artist Goshka Macuga (1967, Poland) makes a new sculpture that rejects the tradition of the lone hero on his plinth. Instead, the artist depicts a surprising, trans-historic collective of five women whose lives and work shaped and changed society and the arts.
The new work pays homage to Chantal Akerman, Belgian pioneer cineaste and visual artist; Andrée Blouin, pan-African political activist and member of the first democratically elected government of post-independence Congo; Patricia De Martelaere, philosopher, professor and author; Marie Popelin, the first woman doctor in Law in Belgium and key-figure in the international women’s movement; and Mathilde Schroyens, the first woman mayor of Antwerp and reformer of the city’s education system.
With Figures of Absence, as the sculpture is titled, Goshka Macuga shows that the history of progress, resistance, and change can only be written truthfully when it is written inclusively. Although there are many statues of religious and allegorical female figures adorning the city, Macuga’s new sculpture is the first ever artwork in the public space of Antwerp dedicated to real historic women and their merits.
For Public Figure, every year a contemporary artist is invited to create a new artwork responding to questions about public representation today: Who or what do we put on a pedestal? Who or what do we portray in the urban common realm? In 2020, for Public Figure #1, artist Tramaine de Senna (1981, US) made a bronze sculpture titled Figure of Color, which was acquired for the Antwerp Public Art Collection.
Ken Lum: Time. And Again.
For his first public project in Belgium, Ken Lum (1956, Canada) creates a new series of billboards addressing matters of work, worries, and self-worth. Though each portrait depicts a singular, unique person, the accompanying texts conjure up fears and frustrations familiar to us all: What will I do if I lose my job? Who will take care of my children when I am at work? Why does nobody see how hard I work?
Work is one of the few truly common aspects of human life. Work is a necessity, and a source of pride and self-worth. But all too often, also a source of uncertainty and stress. The people portrayed in these new works are representative of what Lum recognizes as “persons who are inheritors of the contradictory and too often pernicious effects of modernity. The contemporaneity they find themselves in is often oppressive and the characters have to struggle against it, often feebly.”
This new body of work is titled Time. And Again., alluding to the often excessive amount of time we spend working and worrying (about work), reworking, and rethinking. Repetition is also stylistically present in the short texts accompanying each photographic portrait. Like a mantra or a prayer, each individual tries to come to terms with what they are experiencing through repeated phrases.
