Manon de Boer’s minimalist cinema is at its most radical in her latest film On a Warm Day in July (2015), currently on view at Jan Mot, Brussels. Like a number of her films made over the past ten years, it features a performance—American Soprano Claron McFadden improvises on a seventeenth-century song in the empty ground floor of a Brussels townhouse. In previous works by de Boer, such as one, two, many (2012), Dissonant (2010), or Presto, Perfect Sound (2006), the performer is at the center of the film’s concept, and at the center of the camera’s attention, but in On a Warm Day in July the camera quickly abandons the singer and goes on to wander and explore her surroundings. Void of objects, the space is filled with history, each crack on the wall or scrap of detaching wallpaper a mesmerizing cinematic presence. In de Boer’s work there is often an evacuation of the visual image, giving way to the prominence of the soundtrack and/or voiceover. The filmmaker is consistently interested in unsettling the traditional hierarchy of image over sound, exploring the disjunctures between sound and image that are characteristic of cinematic modernity. Such is the case in her first …

On the way to David Lamelas’s latest show, which inaugurates Jan Mot’s new location in Brussels, I wondered how much of an artist’s practice is trapped in the discourses surrounding its inception. After all, aren’t artworks entangled with, if not contingent upon, the conditions that govern the time of their creation? In particular, I was thinking of those proponents of Conceptual art, who simultaneously created their own discourse. Does the language of Conceptual art have a fixed temporality? If so, what is it? Is it still evolving with the changing times or is it doomed to remain forever in a fixed historical category? Perhaps my thoughts were influenced by Mot’s decision to open his new space with an austere, conceptually driven exhibition that so perfectly represents the spirit of his program. (Isn’t supporting Conceptual art an old Belgian affair, taken up brilliantly by the gallery into its many afterlives today?) Or maybe it was the uncanny experience of finding myself in a maison de maître in the distinguished Rue de la Régence, a location that has just surfaced as a hub for several galleries, instead of the messy downtown corner where Mot’s white cube previously resided. This change not only marks …

In the darkened gallery, two projectors, each threaded with a black-and-white 16mm film by Joachim Koester, cast twin beams of light on two whisper thin screens sandwiched between them. The screens are suspended back to back on taut wires and seem to float in midair. The room purrs and hums moodily; the mechanical apparatuses squat there, arcane and totemic. Pushing through the heavy curtain at the entrance, you have the distinct sensation that you are interrupting a private conversation—but the films are silent. The only thing interrupted is the flow of time. Koester’s films I myself am only a receiving apparatus (2010) and To navigate, in a genuine way, in the unknown necessitates an attitude of daring, but not one of recklessness (2009) both feature actor and poet Morten Soekilde. It’s a decision that creates the illusion of the simplest temporal and narrative links between them: first the man does this, then he does that. The former shows Soekilde in the reconstruction of Kurt Schwitters’s Merzbau (1923-1937) at the Sprengel Museum in Hannover. Koester tightly frames the warped and faceted interior, dulling sharp edges in a soft chiaroscuro that flattens the three-dimensional space into an abstract tableau punctuated with a few …