David Bowen’s work is concerned with aesthetics resulting from interactive, reactive and generative processes as they relate to the intersections between natural and mechanical systems. His installation 5twigs consists of five found twigs that were three-dimensionally scanned, printed in translucent plastic, and mounted with the original twig in opposition to its artificial counterpart. Bowen’s work is a collaboration between the natural form, the mechanism, and the artist.

David Bowen
5twigs

RÍOS // sculpture series proposes a series of speculative cartographies that rise from a digital process of hybridisation of Amazonia related data. The cartographical work produced in Ríos results in a series of twenty-one sculptures. Each sculpture is based on topographic data from a territory delimited by the hydrological sub-basins forming the extensive Amazonian basin and the major tributary rivers nourishing the Amazons River. This time the sculpture Caquetá-Japurá is being exhibited alongside linear version of Lagunas in which prehistoric landscapes are the scenario for the chronicles of a drowning man, disclosing the rarity of water on Planet Earth.

Laura Colmenares Guerra
Festival de la Imagen

With The Physical Mind, Vonk seeks to let participants experience the relation between their physical and mental states by applying physical pressure to the body. The installation consists of two inflatable objects. The participant lays down in between, is lifted up and gently squeezed between the two inflatable objects. The lifting creates an unstable feeling, a slightly stressful sensation that is directly contrasted with a secure feeling of being gently squeezed between two soft objects. Paradoxically, this forced physical stimulus reduces feelings of anxiety, stress and the flight or fight response disappear. The participant experiences an increased sensitivity to stimuli, normalised alertness and a calm state of mind. The positive effects of this increased receptivity can continue for a few hours after the experience. The installation evokes empathy in bystanders who witness a participant undergo the experience.

KIKK Festival
Teun Vonk

That Séverine Ballon is one of today’s most adventurous cellists is evident from this ambitious programme. Along with the electronics wizards of Centre Henri Pousseur, she’ll perform three brand-new works written for her many and varied talents. Her talent as a composer will also be showcased along with works by Annelies Van Parys and Sam Hayden.

The new composition Shades of Light by Annelies Van Parys is a reflection on the relationship between humans and the digital world. About how digital elements penetrate people's lives, facilitate them, change them and finally take over. This acquisition heralds a new era - for better or worse.

Annelies Van Parys — world premiere Shades of Light
Sam Hayden — world premiere
Séverine Ballon — world premiere

Centre Henri Pousseur & Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival  — co-production 

30.10.2022 - 17:30  
Transit Festival, Leuven (B)

23.11.2022 - 13:00  
Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival (UK)

The installation TIPPING POINT is a sensitive and poetic tribute to those dying glaciers. It stages the (re)birth of an artificial glacier protected by a dome; a drip is feeding the glacier that will grow during the exhibition. The device invites the viewer to attend the birth of this artificial glacier. It is inspired by the “ice stupas” invented by the engineer Sonam Wangchuk and used to fight against water shortages during the summer in Ladakh.

Between a laboratory experiment, an attempt to repair the climate or an ironic collector’s item, the installation confronts us with time and scales;  10,000 years ago, the stabilization of our cryosphere coincided with the first human traces we found in Mesopotamia, while the first glaciers are disappearing in 70 years under the pressure of the human activity.

SOLEIL NOIR is an invitation to contemplate a luminous phenomenon, a journey in the hyperspace between artificial light (digital) and natural light (a dying star).

Soleil Noir explores the perception of a fragment of time suspended in the life of a supernova at the moment of its final explosion, just before its extinction... The moment lasts an eternity; the long-awaited explosion never arrives. It is perceptible in the air, as marked by this this kind of floating moment that we feels before falling... Except that here, we will not hit the ground, there will be no dislocation, there will be nothing except this presence, at once impressive and disturbing, strangely vibrating in front of us and yet almost inert, revealed by the light. Unless it is the opposite, let it be this shape that engulfs lights; we are not far from a black hole.

By this suspension in the life of a supernova, Soleil Noir reveals the energy that must be burned to keep alive the datas that we accumulate during our life. Soleil Noir exacerbates the fragility of the world and the elements that compose it, about to break, even if they are imposing and seemingly immortal. It is a moment of precarious balance that expresses the ephemeral dimension of our lives, both digital and physical.

Pléiades, Festival des Arts Numériques de Saint-Etienne

Barthélemy Antoine-Loeff
Tipping Point 
Soleil Noir 

Composers Annelies Van Parys, Aftab Darvishi and Calliope Tsoupaki create new, contemporary sounds for three women who have had to wait in the wings of the great Greek myths far too long. They shine a new light on these women’s stories, add a new nuance to them and infuse them with new power. Is Medea a revengeful monster or a mother consumed with compassion? Is Circe an evil witch or a heroine filled with great humanity? And what about Penelope’s so-called helpless waiting? 

Author Gaea Schoeters found the words that do these women justice: moving yet liberating. Soprano Katharine Dain sings them to life accompanied by the all-female Ragazze Quartet. Three colorful soloists engage in an intense dialogue on clarinet, duduk and canun.

Natalie Haynes, classicist and compelling storyteller, provides the three characters with an introduction.

"Every time we play this program, something magical happens on stage. The stories of three Greek heroines, retold by three female composers. In this concert we are complemented by the warm sounds of duduk, clarinet and canun, plus one of our favorite singers Katharine Dain."  — RAGAZZE QUARTET

Tamar Brüggemann, Wonderfeel — concept

Lunalia, Wonderfeel, Antwerp Liedfest, Mittelfest, November Music, Oranjewoud Festival — co-production 

08.11.2022 - 20:00  
TivoliVredenburg, Utrecht (NL)

09.11.2022 - 20:45  
November Music, 's-Hertogenbosch (NL)

11.11.2022 - 19:30  
St John’s Smith Square, London (UK)

Is what we see really what it seems? BOGUS I  by Kris Verdonck consists of four enormous inflatable sculptures, made out of the black fabric characteristic of the theatre. These automated inflatable sculptures appear and disappear again into their respective boxes. Together, they form a landscape of performative objects. The installation suggests a post-apocalyptic environment, after the end of humanity, when machines have continued without us and have taken proportions we couldn’t have imagined up until now. At the same time, they are sculptures an image of the alienation, the violence and the spectrality of a society in which everything has been turned into a commodified disposable. The size and the ambiguous material turn BOGUS I into an uncanny entity. Or as the Viennese philosopher Günther Anders would formulate it: we are so clueless and breathless when confronted with our own products, as if they were objects delivered to our homes, unsolicited, by inhabitants of a strange planet.

BOGUS I
Chroniques Biennale

An ageing robot is trapped in a room filled with reindeer hair. The machine struggles to raise itself, loses balance and collapses violently. Millions of hairs fly up and temporarily fill the air. They descend quietly and the machine starts another attempt in a long Sisyphean cycle. Is it a state of conflict or an attempt for symbiosis in the eternal drama of order and chaos?  

Lawrence Malstaf has developed various projects exploring the clash and symbiosis of technology and nature. In the dark cage of Flood the wild animal is replaced by a trapped robot. Clouds of pure delicate reindeer hair effortlessly escape the machine. 

Its purpose or problem is unclear. Does it need help with its renegade neural network? Some say AI technology will soon be a much bigger challenge than the current environmental crisis. Yet techno-enthusiasts argue it’s precisely AI that can solve… everything. 

Lawrence Malstaf
Chroniques Biennale

New installation in coproduction with CHRONIQUES CREATIONS, supported by la DRAC Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur, la Région Sud Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur, la Ville de Marseille et l’Institut français à Paris. In coproduction with iMAL.
With the support of De Vlaamse Gemeenschap.

This round table invites Barthélemy Antoine-Loeff who is committed to reducing the environmental impacts of his work and testifies about his approaches, by addressing the technical and creative issues but also the limits and constraints of this type of approach. 

Stéréolux
Barthélemy Antoine-Loeff

The sculptures in the series ENTITIES are performative machines, objects that move by virtue of their own independent energy source. They perform without any interaction or connection with people. These autonomous mobiles are powered by solar, wind or residual heat energy and follow the rhythm of the natural element that sets them in motion.

In ENTITIES #1, two hollowed-out halves of a boulder spin silently opposite and around each other. The motor that drives them is connected to solar panels. Heavy material is thus connected to "light." As with the planets, the sun here too sets a rock in motion - albeit in a different way and on a different scale. 

The ENTITIES series is an investigation of energy as an ever-changing, unstable natural phenomenon. The machines powered by such a source consequently follow a similar unstable rhythm. This goes against how almost all appliances and devices work: they need a continuous, stable supply of energy. Electricity producers therefore generate much more energy than is actually needed or consumed. The study of unstable energy thus poses a fundamental question: what if our technological environment were not based on continuous and instantaneous efficiency and instead operated rather like an irregular ecosystem? 

One immediate consequence of this research is that it goes back to the basics of modern technology. The way almost all machines work today needs to be reconsidered. The mechanical elements of ENTITIES are very similar to Leonardo Da Vinci's mechanics, such as hinges, levers or pivots. This kind of mechanics gives the installations something magical, as if the moving objects are not real, as if gravity does not exist.

One could argue that "performance" in an artistic environment is something exclusively human, or at least reserved for living beings. However, the relationship between performance and unpredictability could be even more essential. When an object and its energy source are completely self-sufficient and its movements unpredictable, it becomes an entity with its own independent cycle. It is no longer just "serving" or performing for people, but has a life of its own. Between old and new techniques, old materials and science fiction, between heaviness and lightness: the entities are hybrid sculptures for a time in search of a new balance.

Kris Verdonck - ENTITIES
Panorama 24 - Le Fresnoy 

SHRINK 01995
Two large, transparent plastic sheets and a device that gradually sucks the air out from between them leave the body (in this case the artist himself) vacuum-packed and vertically suspended. The transparent tube inserted between the two surfaces allows the person inside the installation to regulate the flow of air. As a result of the increasing pressure between the plastic sheets, the surface of the packed body gradually freezes into multiple micro-folds. For the duration of the performance the person inside moves slowly and changes positions, which vary from an almost embryonic position to one resembling a crucified body.

The future is
Today, you can choose your social media pronouns and decide how you want to be defined. It hasn't always been that way. It was not until the 1970s that homosexuality was decriminalised in Norway. Sexual liberation was connected to the student revolution that raged throughout the West. It was a time for new ideas and utopian visions of the future. The exhibition seeks to find a way back to this optimism of the future – a non-binary society – where anything is possible and where everyone can fly. What might a non-binary society look like? The exhibition is a laboratory, an investigation, a thought experiment over a utopian future society.

Lawrence Malstaf - SHRINK 01995
Trondheim Kunstmuseum - The future is