Exhibition

The artistic output of Brussels-based Amber Vanluffelen (b. 1991, Brasschaat, Belgium) is broad and manifold: visual arts, performance, urban interventions and spoken or written word. She often works departing from public space as a source of inspiration, and often returns to it to present her interventions. Vanluffelen is, both as a person and as an artist, inspired by various realities such as ballroom culture, basketball, nightlife, anime etc. - realities in which she operates; realities that she lives as crucial parts of her daily existence. These diverse interests and eclectic passions allow her to create her own narrative, to construct her identity that runs through and engages with these realities.

A reflection hereof impregnates her artistic practice: her activities are sometimes documented and staged alongside objects in scenographic situations in artistic contexts. However, she shies away from instrumentalising the communities she forms part of, but rather takes on an attitude of excitement, fascination, dialogue and participation in which her life and her art are form one and the same thing. 

*Part of the performance program, only on show during the festival weekend.

Atelier Tomas Dirrix
2017, Rotterdam

Atelier Tomas Dirrix was founded in 2017 in Rotterdam, after Dirrix himself won the Meesterproef competition for emerging Belgian and Dutch architects (an initiative by Vlaamse Bouwmeester). The year after, his project selected ‘Possible Structures’ was selected for the talent development grant from the Creative Industries Funds - a project in which he researches and designs architectural structures which simultaneously exist as material configurations, spatial entities and constructive ideas. His architectural practice focuses on the cultural and material implications of building, and does so by seeking to create new organisation principles, relationships and processes for architecture. In 2018 Tomas received the Arc Young Talent Award, and the Unfair Architect Award. For Horst, Tomas will design a theater stage where performance, sound, talks and a dancefloor collide.

Benni Bosetto
b. 1987, Milan
lives and works in Milan

Benni Bosetto merges anthropology, religion, iconology and historic references, to draw open-ended fragmented and associative narratives. Reflections on the human condition and its relation with the body are at the core of her practice, in which she explores instincts such as weakness, violence, happiness and perversion. Through the staging of theatrical settings - be it in her drawings, sculptures, installations or performances -  that appear devoid from time and space, Bosetto explores a pre-logical visual language, as well as the role of the ritual in today’s society. Human communication is mise-en-scene, through the body and its gestures, playing with the senses of her audience. In doing so, she connects back to a shared unconscious collective memory, which reinforces the immersive cathartic experience that her works bring about.

Brandlhuber+ was founded by Arno Brandlhuber (b. 1964), with the aim of installing a collaborative, cross-disciplinary, and discursive practice, hence the ‘+’. This interchange with creatives from other domains (artists, writers, filmmakers, musicians, …) allows for an incorporation of manifold cultural references, sustaining an attitude on the built environment that defies dogma’s or singularity, but rather remains open and inclusive. Brandlhuber+ stands for a new creative class that, by cooperating, has the agency to define our future cities and in which new, more diverse and flexible lifestyles can thrive.

As found originates from a fascination for shifting paradigms, where spaces become abandoned and simultaneously open up new possibilities for alternative occupation. Brandlhuber+ considers architecture as a tool, an instrument to make these spaces accessible, to foster new futures. They take the vast and massive vacant warehouse as they found it, only to intervene on a minimal level. This intervention consists of inserting a mirrored ceiling. It’s echo will create a dancefloor, encouraging interaction amongst the audience, as well as between audience and performers. They curate a moment to imagine, to dance, to experience music.

Carolina Mesquita
b. 1989 Brest
Lives and works in Marseille and Brest

Caroline Mesquita’s lifesize metallic figures in brass, spark an immediate intimate and physical reaction with their audience. Manifesting themselves as anonymous anthropomorphic bodies, they challenge the subject-object gaze that we normally orientate while engaging with art. The enigmatic and mysterious creatures are staged as if we capture a moment in their life, evoking a theater play that exists independently from their spectators’ awareness. In extent, they often appear as protagonists in accompanying stop-motion videos, in which they enter into fraught and tense interaction with each other, or with human beings who can’t but submit themselves.

Christoph Meier
b. 1980, Vienna
Lives and works in Vienna

Christoph Meier works in various disciplines to perform situations in which the everyday logic of reality is relinquished in favour of new modalities of existing. He often incorporates surprising objects within an infrastructural context, elaborating on the narrative potential and of the media and the presentation formats themselves. These scenarios challenge the ‘contract’ between the setting and its visitors, as Meier builds on the suspension of disbelief by incorporating elements that are both unique and serial, distant and immersive, functional and dysfunctional, open and closed, minimal and complex. Through the continuous de-contextualisation and repurposing of these manifold ingredients, visitors are left with an agency to appropriate, reinvent and reimagine what they see. Meier disorients his audience and makes them think about their own role in the theater of reality.

Emeka Ogboh
b. 1977 in Enugu
Works and lives between Lagos and Berlin

Emeka Ogboh works predominantly with sound, which he embeds in all-encapsulating installations, often featuring visual elements. His artistic practice initially focused on recording the sounds of Lagos (Nigeria) to point out its complex and layered cultural landscape and transposing this portraits to different environments. Evolving from there, he directed more towards conceptual site-specific installations which address the fraught socio-political realities of our globalised society. With specific interest in processes such as migration and (post-)colonialism, Ogboh often challenges perceptive dualities by opposing cultural legacies from both sides on the spectrum of ‘the other’.

At Horst he will appropriate a deactivated cooling tower with his renowned installation The Way Earthly Things are Going (2017). The work comprises a screen displaying a live-stream of stock exchange data from around the world, in dialogue with an encompassing 12-channel sound installation of a polyphonic Greek female group Pleiades, bringing the lament When I forget, I am Glad - an empowering work reflecting on forced migration, exile and the makability of one’s own life.

Fala Atelier
2013, Porto

Fala is a self-proclaimed naïve architecture practice based in porto, led by Filipe Magalhães, Ana Luisa Soares and Ahmed Belkhodja. Established in 2013, the atelier works with methodic optimism on a wide range of projects, from territories to birdhouses. Fala’s projects are a medley of formal languages, references, quotations and tropes; its architecture is both intuitive, rhetorical, hedonic and post-modern. Fala has lectured at different universities and institutions, including the Architectural Association, Riba and the Barbican (London), Gsapp (NY), Graham Foundation (Chicago), Centre for Fine Arts (Brussels) among others. Fala has taught at the Architecture Faculties in Venice, Munich, Munster, Liege and Bratislava. Their work has been exhibited at Architecture Biennials in f.i. Venice and Chicago, as well as in solo exhibitions in Panama, Italy, Macedonia, France and Portugal. Their work features regularly on international media platforms.

Lito Kattou
b. 1990, Nicosia
based in Athens

The practice of Lito Kattou is predominantly informed by humanity’s longing for spirituality, which results in an exchange between century-old belief-systems and contemporary forms of devotion in a secular society. She fuses analogue techniques such as metal welding with digital fabrication of printed textiles for example, producing objects that exist as weapons, skins, cosmic elements, mythical creatures and animalistic beings. Kattou incorporates many references from literature and the history of science in her body of work to question the limits of fictionality and make-belief. The cosmic universe and the flow of earthly energies collide in a holistic transverberation that is lived both individually and collectively.

Maarten Van Roy
b. 1985, Bonheiden
Lives and works in Brussels and Cologne

Maarten Van Roy combines in his work a sculptural vocabulary with installative strategies. He creates sculptures and drawings, confronting found objects and artisanal techniques like stone-carving, metal-forging and bronze-casting. The space surrounding these symbiotic constellations and the interaction with the wandering spectator lay bare a holistic continuum between people, objects as well as their contexts. The simple materials and methodologies that fuel his art production determine their visual appearances, in the sense that his works count as sincere and direct reminders of reality. In a society where accelerating planning, performance and production is controlling daily life, Van Roy’s work passes by as a corporeal surplus of life itself.

Manolis D. Lemos
b. 1989, Athens
Lives and works in Athens

Manolis D. Lemos works like a storyteller, infusing disparate cultural references in his various artistic output which includes visual art, video, music (with his Athens-based band Ori) and fashion. Lemos has the unique ability to convey richness through the evocation of absence. The protagonists of his videos rarely appear as clearly defined individuals, but remain in the abstract realm - rendering them archetypical, and allegorical in a way. These videos are staged in scenographies that seduce the senses, to amplify their enigmatic, under-the-skin effect on the viewer. His work mixes an uncanny contemporary Zeitgeist with mythical narratives, often referencing the current socio-economic reality of Greece, as well as its archeological heritage.

Trained in visual arts and dance, choreographer and multidisciplinary artist Michele Rizzo (b. 1984, Milan) makes performance works that explore processes of transformation and transcendence. More specifically, he explores the power of dance by focusing on the nightclub as a site of community building and radical self-expression. The artist draws inspiration from theorist Julia Kristeva’s writings on dance, and particularly her belief in its ability to accelerate the process of trans-humanisation - the  technologically-aided enhancement of human beings beyond their current physical and intellectual limitations.

In Spacewalk, Michele Rizzo attempts to make tangible a hybrid understanding of space. In this work for two performers, he is looking for the invisible within the visible, and the virtual within the material.

The development of technology and the evolution of our imagination are administering stress tests to the material world. As reality echoes in the new spaces of the virtual realm, new ideas and visions of infinity appear. We have learned to escape reality – but also to reinforce and augment it. As a result, we have started to see the space around us as a receiver of our own representations, images and imagination. In Spacewalk two performers engage in a practice that allows them, and the audience, to travel through different spaces. From the physical, concrete space of the warehouse, they pass through the virtual space imagined by the performers in a sculptural set design on the threshold between an archeological site and a futuristic environment. Finally, they land into the infinite space of the unconscious, where movement continues behind closed eyelids.

This performance was made possible thanks to the generous support of the Dutch Embassy within the framework of “Cultural Ambassadors".

Concept and choreography: Michele Rizzo Performance: Reza Mirabi and Michele Rizzo
Music mix: Rodrigo Sobarzo
Set design: Michele Rizzo and Lukas Heistinger
Light design: Michele Rizzo and Lukas Heistinger
Produced by: Frascati Theatre, Amsterdam; AFK Amsterdam Fonds Voor De Kunst

*Part of the performance program, only on show during the Opening of the Exhibition

Word of Daucus, World of Doubt is a 60-minute musically composed monologue, in which the narrator attempts to create a rough taxonomy of the world through one specific object: a carrot. Multiple carrots actually, one after the other. Hoffman imbues the carrots with disparate stories, conspiracies, songs, desires and doubts throughout the performance.
The practice of Vienna-based Nicholas Hoffman (b. 1985, Canton, Ohio) revolves around storytelling, listening and performativity in an effort to displace quotidian life into the realm of the spectacular. Ideas of collective, regenerative listening, and myth construction are performed through speech and music. He deconstructs the power of speech through absurdity: in the end, we’re captivated en enthralled by a paranoid narrator.

Laura Pudelek (b. 1981, Mainz, Germany) lives and works in Vienna as a live- and studio musician and teacher. The range of her musical output includes classical, contemporary and experimental or improvised music.

*Part of the performance program, only on show during the festival weekend.

The Office for Joint Administrative Intelligence (OJAI) was inaugurated in 2015 by Chris Dreier (b. 1961, Wuppertal) and Gary Farrelly (b. 1983, Dublin) and is headquartered in Berlin and Brussels. OJAI research and production is focused on power structures embedded in the built environment and the agency of the self in history’s bigger narrative. Recurring areas of exploration include language, disasters, economics and conspiracy theory. The project has its origins in written correspondence between Dreier and Farrelly and mail remains central to the practice. OJAI research culminates in performances, field trips, exhibitions, conferences and a radio show. In the derelict context of Asiat, they invite you for a game of Bingo. Participate in a quiz on topics ranging from historic disasters, obscure music, national governmental failures and porn, and win your survival package to help you through the apocalypse.

*Part of the performance program, only on show during the festival weekend.

Philip Janssens
b. 1980, Lille
lives and works in Brussels

Philip Janssens’ body of work tends to evoke a certain frustration, since they do not act as containers carrying meaning or concepts. He rather questions the true nature of objects, as well as our way of looking at them, of perceiving and experiencing them - something that we’ve apparently unlearned along the way.  Making use of reflective fabrics or plexiglass surfaces, his confusing abstraction bounces back the spectator’s gaze, to hint at how we trick our imagination into seeing what is not there. Philip is fascinated by conspiracy theories surrounding UFO’s and apparition stories of saints. They illustrate mankind’s ability to structure life and belief around imagined narratives: as soon as these stories - invented or not - are collectively believed, they generate solidarity and communities, linking back to and transforming reality. The shared sense of collective disorientation that occurs hold a similar promise.