Serving Compressed Energy With Vacuum

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.

The moral tale is a literary genre that was especially popular in Europe throughout the 18th century. As ways of being and doing were strongly tied to conventions assigned to social roles and genres, the rise of rationality and freethought, characteristic of this era, began re-organizing the so-called “natural order” of established patterns. Through fables and satires, moral tales expressed sharp critical views on the social relationships and hierarchies of the time, often using radical irony and cruelty, as in the tales of Jonathan Swift or of the Marquis de Sade, to decipher the untold rules at play in this early age of capitalism.

The works of the three artists invited to these Three Moral Tales are not that of moralists, but somehow assume a kind of moral dimension, as they present themselves as critical allegories. Joëlle de La Casinière, Ana Jotta and Anne-Mie Van Kerckhoven make use of fables and sometimes caricatures to observe and criticize the cruelty of human relationships. The “moral tales” narrated by these three artists scrutinize representations of evil, and mock hierarchies, traditions and social order. By doing so, they also follow up on a certain spirit of the iconoclastic avant-gardes of the early 20th century.

French artist Joëlle de la Casinière, Portuguese Ana Jotta and Flemish Anne Mie Van Kerckhoven have in common to pay no fealty to trends of contemporary art. Moreover, they fought unwaveringly throughout their respective careers the need to see their work being given an “official line”. Instead, they stood aside, went underground or remained indifferent to the twists and turns of the art market and institutions. They sometimes created surrogate characters, hid, or playfully modified their names to react to the branding of identity in the artworld, and to the imposed marginalization that they had to cope with as women artists, as did artists living in peripheral geographies. In a way, paradoxically, being marginalized encouraged a calculated versatility of media and styles, and the invention of an idiosyncratic vocabulary, while total freedom remained their one and only rule.

Through more than 500 images by 95 photographers, the Musée de Grenoble's collection of photographs from Antoine de Galbert's collection and his foundation offers an impressive panorama of our times and the decisive role played by photography in shaping our perceptions and contemporary mythologies.

Works by Aalam, Bani Abidi, Antoine d'Agata, Lucien Aigner, Pilar Albarracín, Yolanda Andrade, Sammy Baloji, Ion Bîrlădeanu, Eric Baudelaire, Philippe Bazin, Guillaume Binet, Alain Bizos, Antoni Campana, Mario Carnicelli, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Jean-Philippe Charbonnier, Chieh-Jen Chen, Roman Cieslewicz, Christian Courrèges, David Damoison, Philippe De Gobert, Luc Delahaye, Bernard Descamps, Jean-Marie Donat, Alfred Eisenstaedt, Sandra Eleta, Fouad Elkoury, Charles Fréger, Alberto García-Alix, Laurence Geai, Agnes Geoffray, Julien Gester, Stephan Gladieu, David Goldblatt, Hengameh Golestan, Cosmin Gradinaru, Guillaume Herbaut, Chester Higgins, Kati Horna, John Isaacs, Olivier Jobard, Alain Keler, Yevgeny Khaldeï, Chris Killip, Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen, Oleg Kulik, Olivier Laban-Mattei, Stéphane Lagoutte, Dorothea Lange, Le Tiers Visible, Arthur Leipzig, Alexandre Lewkowicz, Pascal Maître, Yuri Mechitov, Davood Maeili, Edouard Méhomé, Georges Melet, Lívia Melzi, Boris Mikhaïlov, Lisette Model, Etienne Montes, Yan Morvan, Genevieve Naylor, Vladimir Nikitin, Martin Parr, Paolo Pellegrin, Mathieu Pernot, Gilles Raynaldy, Marc Riboud, Sophie Ristelhueber, Hugo Schmölz & Karl Hugo Schmölz, Chantal Stoman, Paul Strand, Mikhael Subotzky, Barthélémy Toguo, Tomasz Tomaszewski, James-Iroha Uchechukwu, Alex Van Gelder, Erwan Venn, Weegee, Where dogs run, Sue Williamson, Wiktoria Wojciechowska, Pavel Wolberg, Tom Wood, Patrick Zachmann, Miron Zownir.

Texts by Antoine de Galbert, Guy Tosatto, Noëlig Le Roux, Antoine Champenois, Joséphine Givodan.

Published on the occasion of the eponymous exhibition at the musée de Grenoble from December 2023 to March 2024.

About her collaboration with Robert Glück, Kathleen Fraser writes:

"In Commemoration of the Visit of Foreign Commercial Representatives to Japan, 1947 is a small picture book assembled as a memento of Japan’s finest tourist sites, to be given to their new allies (and recent adversaries). I discovered the book when my friend Bob Glück sent me to an Asian antique store, where he thought I might find 'little things' for Christmas gifts. Seeing this book in the $1 box, I bought a copy and began to write a poem sequence based on each of the photos and their captions, not knowing that Bob had also bought this book and was writing his own version from the same collection of pictures."

Featuring color reproductions of the entire postcard book, In Commemoration of the Visit is an accidental collaboration–and we couldn’t be happier for the accident.

In ‘Teeth Surrounding a Flower in the Meanings’ a compilation of texts from the critical discourse surrounding his work, written by various authors between 2016 and 2023, serves as source material for a series of erasures.

Through retro- and introspectively reading into the works and the practice at large from poetic angles, these poems investigate the relation between art and its discourse, the words used, and their edges.

This light, pocketbook format publication by After 8 Books gathers works by French artist Julie Beaufils, and three short stories commissioned for the occasion, dealing altogether with social tensions and emotional explosions.
The ink drawings by Julie Beaufils that form the core of the book, follow a logic of editing, accumulation and narrative incompleteness: the figures come from memories of films or TV series, as sediments of mass culture, or sometimes from personal observations and experiences crystallized in images. Shapes and figures develop as an ambivalent collection, informed by the weight and the vibration of lines and strokes.

This book aims at triggering the interpretation of these works, and at making their “reading” more complex, more playful too. Graphic designer Scott Ponik composed a visual story close to a manga, part abstraction, part emotion. The narrative and affective potential of the drawings is further activated by their free association with three short stories by Michael Van den Abeele, Buck Ellison, and Reba Maybury. Van den Abeele tells about the inner thoughts of a donor at the sperm bank; Buck Ellison’s story follows a few hours in the life of some girls in the San Francisco area, dealing with the cruelty and the naïvety of their relationships; while Reba Maybury proposes an erotic analysis of the connection between desire and capitalism.

This publication is presented as an object-book-manifesto of a ‘desespiegles’ way of thinking. It “translates” the trains of thought that architect-artists Anne Philippe and Jolien Naeyaert exchanged via videoletters. The videoletters mainly occurred during the covid period. Questioning the scope of the addressed images, these exchanges revealed a play of symmetries. It shows a series of interrogations, linking the intimate with the collective. The move towards a publication was obvious after conversations with Loes, Phyllis, An and Teresa of nadine. The desire to activate reading in a performative way, mirrors the exchange of videoletters. It continues the process-based methodology that inventively gave birth to a publication through the physical manipulation of the work. The riso-technique proved particularly suitable for this project, as the hands, the gaze and the exchange all played a role during the object-making process.

Dannie.n is an art-zine, published by nadine, about the artistic research, themes, and topics of discussion of the artists involved in nadine. nadine invites an artist or collective to create each new edition.

Dannie.p is a limited-edition artist's book by desespiegles (57 copies). nadine is supported by Vlaamse Gemeenschap, VGC, Brussels Hoofdstedelijk Gewest.