April 2019
DÉBRIS
(Time Contingencies)
Location: Drongenhofkapel Drongenhof 15, 9000 Gent
5-22 April 2019
The exhibition inquires on different ways of approaching to the concept of time. This is a concept that revolves on other notions, such as death, ruin, change, memory, amongst others. A photograph with fungus, an old found object, an old document and a fragment of an old building are examples of matter that transforms its essence to become materials to work with as through the lens of the artist, they retain traces of the passage of time, giving her/him the opportunity to play with such concept. In this exhibition, artists from Colombia, Belgium and the U.K. show several ways on the notion itself and how matter can be related to it.
Many of the works are about architecture: questioning what is a ruin, what it means to build and how architecture changes over time. Other works revolve around old objects and their matter itself. What makes an object to be considered old? What changes in the matter makes us believe that time is passing? Finally, somehow the works relate to the consciousness of one’s own temporarity, which implies consciousness of time.
The Drongenhof chapel is a late Gothic chapel with a single hallway and an impressive wooden spire, of which the ribs rest on corbstones with blazons. The building has pointed arch windows typical for the period. On the facade one can find glazed bricks that date back to 1607. Various bricklayers can be seen in the side walls. The floor is made of sand.
In the only window of the church there is a stained-glass piece made by the artist Wim Delvoye.
This location was of great importance for the exhibition, all the works and the place were in dialogue and connected.
Address:
Drongenhof 15, 9000 Ghent
Size: 221m2 (25 m x 8,85 m)
Ghent: The city started as a settlement at the confluence of the Rivers Scheldt and Leie. In the Late Middle Ages it became one of the largest and richest cities of northern Europe. This is the reason that nowadays, you find lots of medieval buildings in the city center, including many churches, cathedrals (the St. Bavo Cathedral displays the famous "Ghent Alterpiece": 'The Adoration of the Mystic Lamb' by the Van Eyck brothers), fortresses (one with a fire breathing golden dragon on top) and castles.
Leyla Cárdenas (COL)
Cárdenas installation, sculpture, mixed-media work delves into urban ruins and cities landscapes as indications of social transformation, loss and historical memory. Remains, fragments, discarded structures, are used as material for her work, with a sculptural strategy that is as much destructive as constructive.
Recent projects include: Cuenca Bienal in Ecuador: Estructuras Vivientes in 2018. In 2017 her work Excision was part of the exhibition Home-So different, So appealing; shown at LACMA as part of Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA del Getty and at Museum of Fine Arts Houston (MFAH). As well in 2017 she participated in the California Pacific Trienal -Building as Ever- at OCMA (Orange County Museum of Art).
Cárdenas work can be found in public and private collections in Colombia, South America , Europe and throughout the States.
Gert van Dessel
(BE)
Gert is a lighting designer and visual artist. He works with synthetic resin and found objects. His nomadic search provides an archive of weathered materials. He manipulates the old findings and combines them with new materials through which he connects past and present. His traditional method of working and extensive material research gives unexpected textures and connections.
Lia Garcia
(COL)
The main axis of Lia's work is to name, number and classify the world starting from a drawing in order to understand it, know it and project it.
Through different series of drawings that she has made, she tries to create relationships that encourage the viewer to read the work not as individual pieces but as a collective that generates a certain concept, and that allows the viewer to organize and reorganize the information and charge it with meaning taking into account their point of view and relating to their own experience.
Her work constitutes a reflection on the landscape, both urban and private. Her drawings allude to that other landscape that does not appear on postcards, that is not portrayed, and that sometimes wants to be ignored and replaced by other more traditional configurations of it.
In this sense, the periphery in her work is a place of exchange that breaks the physical delimitation of "form" or "morphology" and that reconfigures her perspective on her surroundings out of fragments.
Camilo Bojaca (COL)
Camilo explores different techniques of drawing, animation and video from which he builds a relationship with the world. In his work, the landscape of the city is a recurring theme. He draws elements attending to the problems of the city: to make a comment, a remark or simply to question the image as such. Another element he works with is the image of scale and power. He is interested in the drawing as a work space as well as a mental space and the material of which this is composed. In his last intervention projects like “errors that are consumed by the time” and “Garden of weeds” he approaches the relation between nature and architecture to explore new political notions and landscape.
Marcela Varela
(COL)
Marcela's work has focused mainly on drawing, which is a tool that allows the creation of multidisciplinary proposals. During the last years she has developed installation projects, ceramics and video, departing from topics such as the everyday life, trivial things that draw her attention, and particular stories of the places where she carries out projects. These stories are narrated in series of line drawings, ceramics and fiction stories transposed to video, where she exposes fantasy mixed with reality. In all her work the color, the detail and the material play an important role for the development of each piece.
Lee Cutter (ENG)
Lee is a curator, self-published writer, events producer and a visual artist working with drawing, sculpture and installation.
His work is about social reform and raising awareness to the hidden, and often unheard voices, of those from marginalised groups. Recent projects draw attention to the everyday of prison culture in Britain.
Time is imperative to the structure and daily functioning of prison and yet time can also begin to dissimulate when locked away in a small cell. He reflects on his own experience of isolation by using prison soap and prison bedsheets to explore time, and the timelessness, of dreams and memory.
Joan Casas (COL)
Joan's work consists of installations, photographs, drawings and paintings. It proposes in an effective way how to present the concrete contents of each work, which will determine the medium that the artist will ultimately select. The scale can vary from the size of a small drawing, painting or of a large installation that will surround the largest space available. The artist not only uses a wide variety of media but also uses multiple aesthetic forms, ranging from an economic language, minimalist visual overload, exaggerated designs, always with the aim of articulating the content of the work as accurately as possible.
Laura Peña Murcia
(COL)
Laura's work is an approach to how our existence is modeled and defined throughout life by notions of meaning that decide what is considered "reality". She is interested in the way in which subjectivity and our perceptions have been conditioned by instructions, knowledge, prejudices, rites and myths that are rehearsed and apprehended throughout our lives. This is reflected in her work as a poetic in which revelations and concealments make it possible to believe that reality is not as we see it, leading to the consciousness of a reality that does not exist as determined by that consciousness.
A ruin is only a ruin if in the eyes of someone something fell, decayed... There is only a ruin if it is observed, but, independent of the observer, the matter exists.
Widy Ortiz and
Daniela Carreño
(COL)
Carreño & Ortiz, is a duo of artists, composed by Daniela Carreño Reina and Widy Ortiz, which was created in 2018 from the idea of gestating artistic projects, where it predominates more than the interest in the techniques, the ideas of sharing personal experiences of each one with respect to their lives, arriving at the concretion of two thoughts, that are intertwined in compound works. Note: for the moment the duo is paused.
Project direction and art works selection by
LAURA PEÑA
PARCE DIRECTOR
THE COLOMBIAN EMBASSY FOR THE KINGDOM OF BELGIUM
realising the participation of our specially invited artist Leyla Cárdenas from Colombia and attending and supporting our opening reception
For this project we thankfully received support of:
News item by Canal SimiTV
The exhibition was based on the connections of people from different places. The project is organized on the basis of collaboration, from our own funds (by way of self-management) and the funds of the artists. We are trying to collect some recourses in order to assist some artists with covering part of their travel and transportation costs. If you want to support us, in general or for a specific project, please follow the link below to find out how.