ON COMMON GROUND

ON COMMON GROUND

For some time now, China’s most splendid economic metropolis, Shanghai, has been the meeting point between China and the international artistic community. It is as part of this budding tradition that Shanghai’s Minsheng Art Museum is hosting an exhibition project conceived in Europe's capital: for three weeks, Brussels will be represented in Shanghai by five of its most brilliant artists. The exhibition, Brussels Body Speech, was born from two simple questions. What artistic practices strongly related to Brussels’ art are likely to provoke curiosity? And: how could these practices be presented in such a way as to promote an exchange of expertise between the art worlds in China and Belgium, and so as to spark an ongoing dialogue that would open up new horizons and new debates?

As an answer to the first question, Brussels Body Speech puts contemporary dance and a certain brand of science in a strong conflictual situation; the tension created from this meeting of dance and science marks the whole exhibition.

Dance, perhaps the oldest form of human intelligence, is represented by world-renowned Brussels choreographer, Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker. Dance, understood as language which accompanied the humanity throughout its historical development, entered a new era of expression and refinement in the early 1980, when de Keersmaeker wrote a whole new chapter in the history of dance. Recognition of this event was immediate, and global: the choreographer was everywhere praised for her powerful intelligence and for the originality of her choreographic design. This early triumph was only the beginning in what would turn out to be one of the most amazing dance careers of our time.

Day after day, dancers celebrate their main instrument of expression, the human body, surprising their audiences time and again with the innovative and varied ways they find to make the body speak.

In the world of science, on the other hand, we can detect a new tendency, over a decade old, in ways of thinking about the future form of our good old human body. A scientific movement, known as ‘transhumanism’, is founded on the conviction that the human body as we know it is not fit for the challenges that future human generations will be confronted with. As a result, they work towards developing technologies intended to make up for human weaknesses, thus improving the overall performance of the human body. Frank Theys' film Technocalyps is the result of four years of research, and it offers an in- depth picture of ‘transhumanist’ scientific practices, and the grey zones that surround human intelligence and academia. The film has by now gained cult-status both in artistic and in scientific circles.

Shall we dance and celebrate the human body? Shall we try to improve its shape out of fear for what the future has in story? Or shall we leave it behind all together?

A lot has to do with how we look at who we are. How do we perceive the other? What kind of idea do we cherish about the person we think we are, physically? Notions of identity, linked more and more to the human body, cannot be dissociated from questions of perception (what do we see? and what do we think we see?) and perception is a key element in the work of Ann Veronica Janssens.

Trained as a sculptor, Janssens gradually moved away from the treatment of physical material, preferring instead to work with experimental environments dominated by elementary conflicts between light and the obstruction of light, between the appearance and disappearance of colour, environments, finally, in which the spectator becomes both the observer and the observed. Her Mist Room, in red, yellow and blue (1999), was copied in 2010 by the Berlin-based artist Olafür Eliasson, and presented, without the permission of the artist and without mentioning her authorship, at the Ulens Centre for Contemporary Art in Beijing. The original work is now on view, for the first time in China, at the Minsheng Art Museum.

The work of David Claerbout brings the body back to where it belongs. Human beings exist in response to environments; they borrow the idea of identity from an environment that offers the body a system of references.

Sections of a happy moment takes place in a suburb of Antwerp constructed by a famous modernist architect. Back in the 1950s, the buildings in Claerbout’s piece are a dream of Bauhaus-inspired modernism, and the people who lived in them thought they had won a ticket to the future. The apartments, comfortable and well designed, used Le Corbusier’s standard of scale, called the modulor: this standard that had no other reference than the human body. And yes, the whole world joined that same idea one wonderful summer, in 1958, when Brussels hosted the first World Expo since the end of World War 2. The best those buildings have to offer today is a sweet souvenir of the past, since, over the years, they have became low-income housing blocks in a pr0oblematic part of town. Playing a fascinating game with the rules of history, Claerbout made a sophisticated photography-based reconstruction of the site, cleaning the buildings with the help of computer technology, and reinstalling the original green areas with fresh little trees. Chinese families are playing there now ...

But environments are also based on structures and networks. Their junctions are the meeting points for codes and references that we never mention or think about because the body lives and reacts to the environment as whole. Whoever thinks about the presence of an outside wall, when he or she is inside a room? Who would have thought that every time we address each other using words, we are activating highly complex systems of reference that influence our understanding of the place we are in? And what happens if we unilaterally decide no longer to use a word like, let's say, wall, in the strict sense the dictionary wants us to use that word? To do so is to enter the world of Joëlle Tuerlinckx, a world of never-ending investigations into our understanding of the environment we live in, a world commonly known as that of conceptual art, one in which meaning(s) become volatile and traditional anchors such as time and space loosen their grip on the situation the artist installs. Please take a look: what you see is not what you see.

These five different aesthetic positions on the notion of the human body make up the visual part of Brussels Body Speech. In connection with this same project, however, the Minsheng Art Museum, together with Shanghai’s universities and art academies, are offering an important and multifaceted programme of workshops, lectures, and debated.

As part of this programme, Fudan University is organizing the first international symposium on ‘transhumanism’ to be held in China. The symposium is scheduled to take place at a culminating point of the project: it closes a week of intense confrontation between the artist Frank Theys, and the students from universities and art academies that participated in one of several workshops on the subject on the agenda that week.

Initiated by physicist Diederik Aerts, the colloquium Einstein meets Magritte in Shanghai brings to the Minsheng Art Museum a diverse group of scientist, philosophers, and artists. The aim is to create an ideal environment for reflection on key concepts of human cognition, and to link creativity to such complex scientific problems as quantum physics.

On the programme are also lectures on contemporary dance in Brussels, by Pieter Tjonck, and on conceptual art, by Tony Godfrey. Both will offer some insight into the historical context that saw the emergence of those two tendencies of contemporary culture.

The symposia, lectures, and workshops are conceived in order to spark common interest and the desire to reach common ground. Above all, they aim to provoke curiosity and dialogue between Shanghai and Brussels, between China and Belgium. We hope to leave our Chinese friends and colleagues with more questions then answers, just as we hope that we will find ourselves, once we are back in Brussels, unable to close this Chinese chapter, because, here again, there will still be too many questions to deal with. Let this stand for an accurate description of what we could call our common ground.

I would like to conclude by saying that the entire Brussels Body Speech team has been invited to visit China’s Art Academy, in Hangzhou. I can hardly think of a better place to fall in love with China as country, and as one of the great cultural nations of the world.

Hans Maria de Wolf
Curator