From the jury report: Which other artist could match this: In one year at least four significant premières including "A War Requiem" as the official closing moment for the 14-18 commemoration ... The music was confronting, it was ruthless and spectacular. In every single note ... She wrote the chamber opera "Usher" upon the request of the Deutsche Staatsoper Unter den Linden Berlin and Folkoperan Stockholm. Van Parys always knows how to charm. Her music touches all your senses. Annelies Van Parys is a composer and artist that you can’t get around any more, she is the music personality of the year.

VRT NWS
Klara
http://www.anneliesvanparys.be

The project A Sense of Gravity started with Teun Vonk questioning: How can I challenge the logic of gravity, of the bodily perception of gravity, with a machine or installation? Can I expand the boundaries of our everyday perception of gravity? 

A Sense of Gravity is based on artistic research and interdisciplinary collaborations, blending the boundaries between science, technology, design and visual art
While being immersed in the installation, the viewer experiences a bodily sensation of weightlessness. This experience causes a new perspective and perception of gravity on an individual level. With a Sense of Gravity, Teun Vonk creates awareness of our human sensibility and new perspectives on the relevance of our physical being in the digital culture of the future.

https://strp.nl/program/a-sense-of-gravity
https://www.teunvonk.nl/a-sense-of-gravity/

The TENDENCIES exhibition focuses on works that question scientific and technological innovations as much as they incorporate them. For this fourth edition, it looks at our relationship with possible futures, be they dystopian or utopian. 

The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new.
(Samuel Beckett, Murphy)

In the installation DETAIL, a large and massive boulder hangs on the ceiling. It is hanging on a steel cable, on a ball bearing, allowing it to fully turn around its axis. The ball bearing is put in motion by a steel wheel rotated by a motor which takes its energy from solar panels. The whole chain leads to a relatively simple situation: whenever the sun shines, the boulder turns around its axis. Once the sun shines, and therefore the stone starts to revolve, the mechanism is simultaneously unrelenting: the fatalism of a world that has to and will turn. A mobile with sunlight. A surreal image with an undertone of danger and yet fascinating at the same time. 

The whole (complicated) technical construction has no other goal than to have the “poetry” of a heavy colossus float and turn around. DETAIL is in this sense a pointless use of knowledge and material which makes it even all the more alienating. The question can also be put forward as to whether many other developments that we call ‘technical progress’ really do help the world. The destructive potential of ever greater, faster, more efficient and automatic algorithms, processors, motors and fire power assert their influence on a daily basis in wars and in the depletion of our planet. Where is technological knowledge taking us and does it make us able to handle the problems of our age for the most part caused by ‘technological progress’? DETAIL is then also a stationary situation: frozen, hanging in the air, turning in circles in a vacuum.