Exhumer le futur
June 10–October 30, 2022
La Fonderie
16 rue de la Fonderie
68093 Mulhouse
France
Hours: Wednesday–Friday 12–6pm
Saturday–Sunday 2–6pm
T +33 3 69 77 66 47
kunsthalle@mulhouse.fr
La Kunsthalle Mulhouse welcomes Exhumer le futur, an exhibition of the artist Maarten Vanden Eynde.
Seated on the fractured earth, Maarten Vanden Eynde uses plaster to fill in the cracks in the surface of a dried-up lakebed. Restauration du lac de Montbel (Restoring Lake Montbel) serves as a perfect prologue to this exhibition. Immersed in his image, the artist makes a simple and ludicrous gesture against a climate-related phenomenon, an act on the human scale, ambitious but deliberately in vain. He does not so much restore the lake as shed light on a natural catastrophe that both surrounds and overwhelms him. With this work, the artist lays out a framework with which to question, sometimes speculatively, the role and the consequences of human actions within the Earth’s ecosystems.
Previously exhibited at the Mu.Zee in Ostende in 2021 before arriving at the Kunsthalle in Mulhouse, Exhumer le futur (Digging up the future) is Maarten Vanden Eynde’s second retrospective exhibition, based on an eponymous book contextualizing his work and covering 20 years of persevering and still ongoing research. For the Mulhouse exhibition, a selection of catalogued works is organized around the issue of industrialization, production processes and the transformation of raw materials and products. Maarten Vanden Eynde has also created a new piece for the exhibition, Fat Man 3D, a literal reference to the code name of the atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki, Japan in 1945. The work links together three countries in the artist’s personal history: the Congo, which supplies raw materials such as cotton and uranium; France, in particular the Mulhouse industries which manufacture thread from cotton fiber; and Belgium, which transforms cotton thread into exceptional lacework. All of these come together in the form of an explosive installation suspended in the art center’s entry hall.
A proposal by Katerina Gregos and Sandrine Wymann.
Maarten Vanden Eynde is a visual artist based in Brussels, Belgium and Saint-Mihiel, France.
Free admission.
Art Basel opening hours:
June 14–17
Tuesday–Friday, 10am–6pm
Saturday and Sunday, 2–6pm
Enquiries/press office: Clarisse Schwarb, Clarisse.schwarb@mulhouse.fr
Sign up for the shuttle from from Basel to Mulhouse by emailing kunsthalle@mulhouse.fr.
The exhibition is produced with the generous support of Flanders State of the Art (Belgium).
La Kunsthalle Mulhouse is labeled “Center for Contemporary Art of National Interest” and a City of Mulhouse cultural establishment.
With the support from the Regional Cultural Affairs Office of Grand Est - French Ministry of Culture and Collectivité européenne d’Alsace.
