Fri 28 June 2024
Beursschouwburg — Red hall & pop-up art shop — 16:00
As part of the festival Homografía, La Garçonnière Prod. and Banquet Production, with Agathe Dananaï and Lucie Pinier present a selection of five artists in incisive dialogue with the programme, celebrating non-normative representations, the fluidity of desires and the quest for interconnections. The variety of mediums and perspectives successively explore the representation of bodies and identities in the digital age. Here, figurative painting is questioned through the prism of non-binary, playing with contemporary symbols and using selfies as a tool for positive self-portrayal. The idea of safer space, both ecological and political, questions borders, facilitates interactions and paves the way to a fascinating hybridity between human, machine and non-human beings. Folk images are blended with queer imaginaries to create new figures of desire, acting both as spells and as objects of healing. The complexity of nature enters into a dialogue with popular iconography. Art as a political and social act, gives voice to activism, healing, celebration, enchantment and empowerment!
opening days
FRIDAY 28th June: 16-22
SATURDAY 29th June: 12-18
SUNDAY 30th June: CLOSED
MONDAY 1st July: 13-17
TUESDAY 2nd July: 13-17
WEDNESDAY 3rd July: 13-16
Benjamin Huynh
— France, Belgium
Benjamin Huynh’s work is seeking to explore the potential of painting, through the concepts of care, inclusion and soft activism intertwined with contemporary queer political issues. These notions function as essential survival strategies in late capitalism.
Their work begins with collaborations with friends to generate source materials, particularly selfies, an approach that aims to be positive and challenge the representation of bodies. In this way, painting serves as a tool to cross the worlds of images, oscillating here between the history of Western figurative painting and the self-representation of the 21st century through photography. Reexamining traditional aesthetics and gender assignments, Benjamin’s work actively involves the people painted in a horizontal relationship with the artist.
These proposals connect painting with the question of the device. Textile work and installation become tools to free oneself from the canvas while redefining museography and the exhibition as a place of passage. Figurative painting then disrupts the distance-object interaction, culminating in installations where the works and the viewers converge.
At the heart of this exploration is a sprawling approach, which weaves together contemporary themes of interconnection, privacy and self-representation. Reference images derived from selfies serve as a channel to explore identity, the embodiment of bodies, and the impact of the digital age on self-expression. Benjamin’s practice is not conceived as a series, but rather as a collection of interconnected objects, each engaging in a dialogue with the others.
Kim Doan Quoc
— France
Kim Doan Quoc experiments with the public’s reception conditions, thinking about aesthetics, lights and smells. Believing in the political dimension of well-being and rest, individual and collective, they work on the development of immersive and performative pieces which are both spaces for relaxation and speaking out. They are particularly interested in natural sciences, in the sharing and vulgarization of scientific information via these immersive environments. The fascination and exploration of nature is a powerful social bond, scientific knowledge a real power of autonomy. Their interests lie at the intersection of arts and sciences. By interacting with scientists, contemporary art lovers and political activists, they create bridges between these different areas without establishing a hierarchy between them. Confident about the power of collaborative and transdisciplinary work, their research is organized around the idea of protected space (safe space), in both the ecological and political sense.
Néo
— France, Belgium
Néo’s work revolves around the exploration of human interiority, facing what Carl Jung calls the “structure of the soul”. In this pictorial research, she explores notions such as desire, loneliness, mental health, relationship between the body and its environment. There is a constant dialogue between interiority and exteriority, the infinitely large and the infinitely small, in which the viewer is a privileged witness.
The characters are the representation of an unfinished self and are non-gendered, because in this search for deep identity there is for Néo no room for binary. They are the expression of a unique, synthetic and universal being. Faces are not visible and merge with a dark matter to create a whole.
Néo’s work is influenced by nature, literature, her own dreams and experiences. It represents the complexity of the human being seen through the prism of queer aesthetics.
Erwan Roussel
— France, Belgium
The Defixions are a work-in-progress series of embossed metal pieces. Between the ex-voto and the ancient curse plaque, they fix on the aluminum an inverted spell, a charm of sadness, or the prayer of an intimate devotion.
HIV Mandala is a care flag. It represents the virus, mid-way between the structural diagram and the mandala. This flag springs from a process of acceptance and a necessity for the artist to represent an occupying entity rather than a viral load. A totem to evoke an invisible.
Nicolas Stolarczyk
— France, Belgium
Dragogo shows up for Homografía festival, shy and flamboyant. He lets us see a pearly ornament, adorned with a radioactive duvet. Is it a tooth? A claw? A piece of his crest?
