by Eva Heisler on August 6, 2012
Un-Scene II, curated by Elena Filipovic and Anne-Claire Schmitz, is the second installment of what is to be a triennial inquiry into the practices of Belgium-based artists. It is not, however, a show about Belgian artists. Half the artists are non-Belgian. Rather, the ambition is to investigate art-making at this particular moment in Belgium.
Since its inaugural show in 2009, Un-Scene’s curatorial approach has been characterized by its resistance to any impulse to define a Belgian “scene”. Because Belgium is composed of two primary language communities, attempts to define Belgian art are dismissed as “mischievous” by curators Devrim Bayar, Charles Gohy and Dirk Snauwaert in the catalogue for the first Un-Scene. Stereotypes such as “French-speaking artists [tend] toward sardonic humour and language games, whilst Flemish artists … tend toward melancholic descriptions and mystifications” are avoided by including artists actively working in Belgium, regardless of citizenship.
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by Eva Heisler on July 3, 2012
“A portable climate.” That’s what Ralph Waldo Emerson called coal. “Every basket is power and civilization,” he wrote in 1860. Coal is not only a portable climate but “it is the means of transporting itself whithersoever it is wanted,” Emerson added, noting “a half-ounce of coal will draw two tons a mile, and coal carries coal, by rail and by boat, to make Canada as warm as Calcutta.”
Writing 100 years later, Thomas McGrath contrasts coal fire to wood fire in his poem “A Coal Fire in Winter.” With a coal fire, there is “[s]omething old and tyrannical burning there.” This is “heat / From the time before there was fire.” Coal, compressed plant matter accumulated over 100,000 years, is the legacy of a “sunken kingdom” and its flames are “carbon serpents of bituminous gardens.”
Coal—as fuel, as fossil, as material, as metaphor, as “black gold,” as historical force—is the starting point of Manifesta 9, situated in the main building of the former Waterschei mining facility in Genk, Belgium.
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