Jacques Lizène, Urgent conversations, EMST, Athens contemporary Museum

Urgent conversations

Jacques Lizène participe à l’exposition inaugurale du nouveau musée d’art contemporain d’Athènes (EMST), « Urgent conversations : Athens – Antwerp »

Urgent Conversations: Athens – Antwerp is the first temporary exhibition in the long overdue public unfolding of the Greek National Museum of Contemporary Art, Athens (EMST). The project offers a reflective dialogue between the collections of EMST and M HKA, the Flemish Contemporary Art Museum, based in Antwerp. This exhibition commences the program EMST in the World.

The impulse of both Urgent Conversations: Athens – Antwerp and EMST in the World is the necessity of cultural dialogue on a global scale, also within multifaceted Europe. Societies nowadays tend to polarize in 49 % versus 51 % camps, negotiations start from antagonistic positions as a default position, introversion and individualism became entrenched states. There may be loftier aspirations than the capacity of conversation, but its recent fragility often reached critical levels and can be described as an urgent situation.

Urgent Conversations: Athens – Antwerp has been developed bottom up, each time starting from work of a Greek and a Belgian artist, that resonate, searching a notion that arises from this resonance, then adding a third artist from elsewhere in one of the two collections. In this way the exhibition was structured around 22 notions with each time work of three artists in a dialogue around it, the total consisting of more than 70 works from 66 artists.

This exhibition enacts the belief of both museums that works of art may constantly emanate new meanings, open questions and initiate a much desired dialogue, that basic ground for human culture. This project is therefore also a counter-proposal to cultural and curatorial sameness, opting instead for a multitude of convincing constellations of subjects, impossible to exhaust, leading up to discussions concerning both individual and collective realizations, and to actions.

Athens and Antwerp seem to represent two extremes of Europe today, but at the same time Greece and Flanders are both regions of Europe that added many crucial threads to its cultural fabric. Institutions like EMST and M HKA may further cultivate that. EMST in the World will develop in the same vein further dialectical relations between EMST and institutions elsewhere with corresponding aims and practices, geared to the research and curation of contemporary art and other contemporary cultural manifestations.

Jacques Lizène, Lucas Samaras, Douglas Gordon : THE UNSTABLE SELF

Jacques Lizène

We thought of the Unstable Self while discussing the works of Jacques Lizène, Lucas Samaras and Douglas Gordon.
Unlike in the myth of Narcissus, in real life we rarely fall in love with ourselves. Looking at a reflecting pool one can encounter the abyssal unknown or come face to face with a chimaera: a monster composed by more than one animal. The randomness and transitional nature of what we are, the constant internal battle between opposing tendencies within us and the fluidity of what we often perceive with certainty as our anchor to existence is revealed with deep introspection, psychoanalysis, chemical substances and mind affecting diseases. Maybe it is this knowledge, that self is not a topos but a journey, which saves us from the vengeance of Nemesis.
We are monsters, Lizène states, accidental mixtures of two sources of genetical material, he therefore took a vasectomy not to procreate, after that it is joyful to be a “cadavre exquis”. Gordon confronts in Self Portrait (Kissing with Scopolamine) his own reflection by kissing another face with a truth drug on his lips. Samaras makes with Self what amounts to an autobiography through his body.

ΕΜSΤ- M HKA
Urgent Conversations: Athens-Antwerp
Opening: 31 October 2016
October 31, 2016 – January 29, 2017
Curated by: Bart De Baere, Katerina Koskina
Assistant Curators: Stamatis Schizakis, Jan De Vree

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