Au fort les âmes sont

De vijde Nederlandstalige GLEAN editie.

Bijdrages over Chantal Akerman, Biënnale van Venetië, Eline de Clercq, Samah Hijawi, Laure Prouvost, Anastasia Bay, Wim Delvoye, Riar Rizaldi, Haegue Yang, Nil Yalter, Anna Maria Mariolino.

There are countless ways to interpret death, and The Jacuzzi of Despair does not aim to add to them. Instead, it fizzes, swirls, weeps, and sweeps—an unsettled current of images and arrangements, placing Sharon Van Overmeiren's sculptures within a strange narrative of mortality and rebirth. Born from a collaboration with graphic designer Nana Esi, the publication refracts Sharon's work through a series of familiar yet elusive aesthetic mechanisms: from the speculative and ritualistic to the archival and surreal, from the encyclopaedic urge to categorise, to the spectacle of commercial catchphrases. As such, The Jacuzzi of Despair navigates and distorts the symbolic structures by which we typically frame life and death, suggesting a new order wherein their ineffable dimensions do not stand apart but fold seamlessly into one another. What emerges is a disorienting artifact, a publication both buoyant and weighty, performing a slippery, playful, and evocative attempt to grasp the mechanisms by which we make sense of life—only to dissolve them into incoherence, creating the conditions for new meanings to take root.

Published on the occasion occasion at Cultuurhuis De Warande, Turnhout, in 2025.

Sharon Van Overmeiren (born 1985, lives and works in Belgium) makes, in her own words, "fictional sculptures". She finds it difficult to qualify them as fully autonomous pieces, given that at any moment they may cease to exist in their current form of presentation. On a second level, this choice of wording refers to how she lends a voice to her sculptures; by providing them with a scenario based on found stories, taken from life or literature, combined with her own sense of how we are out of touch with the multiple objects that surround us. The sculptures make their appearance as "props" in a composition, installation or drawing, or as protagonists of a video or audio piece. In no small part, these works deal with the growing inability of the human mind to describe and experience "things" beyond its own desires.

The publication Actors & Extras appears following the exhibition of the same name at Argos. Five authors highlight the theme of characterisation from various angles. Georges Didi-Huberman’s contribution People exposed, People as Extras explores how cinema represents the masses. Sven Lütticken highlights the performance tradition in the visual arts in relation to the producing of subjectivity. On the basis of the classic cinema, in Figures of the Extra, Paul Willemsen composes a typology of the extra and subsequently gives attention to the aberrant status of the extra in modern cinema and contemporary art.

Thomas Trummer’s Volonté Générale. Extras in Film and Democracy questions the responsibility of the anonymous individual. With The Passing Actor: Sketch of a Renaissance Jean-Louis Comolli analyses how the concept of acting in a documentary has a different interpretation than in a fiction film. The last part of the publication describes the selected works in the exhibition.

Texts by: Clemens von Wedemeyer, João Onofre, Mark Lewis, Mike Figgis, Jeremy Deller, Irina Botea, Christian Jankowski, Aernout Mik, Krassimir Terziev, Julika Rudelius

Goswell Road publishes ‘Numbered Map’ by Archie Chekatouski, to accompany his exhibition 'You can do so much more with a chair than you can with a painting?'. The publication is edited in 30 copies and focuses on Chekatouski’s Paint-by-numbers Series.

Bio: Archie Chekatouski (born 1996 in Minsk, Belarus) lives and works in Paris. His works are touchingly silly and beautifully simple.
 

In 1971, Michael Morris and Vincent Tarsov—founders of the Vancouver-based artist network Image Bank—invited Eric Metcalfe, Gary Lee Nova, Glenn Lewis and Paul Oberst to create their own, unique alphabet. NowForty years later, with the permission of the participating artists and the help of Image Bank, these historic silk-screened alphabets have finally been published together. The Alphabet Book is designed by Marc Hollenstein, who was inspired to reinitiate the alphabet publication project after having a conversation with Glenn Lewis during the opening of Lewis’ retrospective exhibition at Kunstverein back in 2014.

With the series '24 European Ethnographic Museums' Van der Heide questions the construction and identity of the ethnographic museum today. Here, the project becomes a collection of artefacts in and upon itself and by recording the names of these institutions Van der Heide places the viewer in front of the dilemma: who is authorized to decide what is an artefact, and what should be collected and for what reason? In the 19th century, with the birth of the current European nations, museums openly referred to their colonial past. Today the museums bare more euphemistic names like: ‘Museum der Kulturen’ or ‘World Museum’ but still place the West as the self-acclaimed center of the world.  The existence of the ethnographic museum, which is intertwined with the complicated and loaded colonial past, has been subject to contemporary criticism. While some of the European ethnographic institutions have attempted to come to terms with the past of their collections and their heritage, Van der Heide focuses upon how language continues to reflect the political present of the institutions.