by BOZAR
Swash Mark
We are all familiar with them: the porcelain figures, elephants and model ships that sit on windowsills behind dainty curtains. Simona Denicolai and Ivo Provoost have created an exhibition with them at the Centre for Fine Arts and in the streets of Brussels. They exhibit objects that they have found lying around in the public space and through them expose the nervous system of an urban environment, for these things also lie around in the collective consciousness.
“The project EYELINER focuses on objects that are displayed in the windows of small merchants and on window ledges, and thus also focuses on the people that put them there. In our eyes, therefore the “exhibition” was already taking place. A selection of objects has been temporarily relocated to BOZAR and in the meantime, a placard has been put in place at the spot they have abandoned to indicate that the objects are currently on loan to another exhibition at the Centre for Fine Arts. you often read this kind of messages in museums when an artwork is being exhibit- ed elsewhere for a period of time.”
“These objects offer a more profound glimpse behind the scenes of the city. They take a covert look at what is happening on the other side of the façades. At first sight, they seem to have been set down casually. We looked for objects with a “will” to be exhibited, objects loaded with intentions and stories addressed to the passer-by. And yet sometimes the stories behind the ob- jects are less straightforward. A lot of the objects on the window ledges of Brussels testify to the question of Belgium’s colonial past, as is the case with the African sculpture that a Portuguese family found on the street and displayed in their window, or in some pages - the less controversial ones - from the comic book Tintin in the Congo that an Italian student had used to cover his windows. Thus, every individual object, every relic of the past, fits into a wider discourse that is intertwined with the history and
individuality of a place.”
Mediating, not commanding
“People of all ages and all cultures put things in their win- dows. In more popular areas one encounters more objects exhib- ited than in areas where neighbours tend to live alongside rather than with one another, but in general you can say that the objects draw a vertical line through all social classes. The objects that we selected for the exhibition belong to both political refugees and gold merchants. Some of the objects we had on the eye since ten years, whilst others have only been discovered in the context of EYELINER during our drifts in the city. All of them lie on the porous dividing line between the intimate and the public world.”
“This dividing line stretches out through the city“s streets for hundreds of kilometres, like a tideline of materials thrown up by the sea. We followed this line, singled out particular objects, and brought them together at the Centre for Fine Arts. After the exhibition, each will return to its permanent spot in a window. At that point, a subsequent exhibition will begin, one that was already there: an exhibition in the city, that you can visit after May 28, 2017 using a guidebook mentioning the objects and their owners, complete with their addresses and biographies. Once back on the window ledges, one can track the objects alongside those that didn”t make the trip to BOZAR. Although we are working with objects and moving them, our intervention is in fact immaterial. We are taking up the role of a director who creates scenarios with the available material. In these kind of projects, we involve people who are embedded in the context, people who know what lives under the skin of a society. What takes place in a hyper-local context can be understood anywhere else on the globe. In other ways, what happens globally, is not always easy to place on a local level.”