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Greetings from Molenbeek offers a layered insight into the visual work of Needcompany, the company which is curating the contemporary dance festival December Dance in 2019. Needcompany was founded by Jan Lauwers and Grace Ellen Barkey in 1986. The artist Maarten Seghers joined Needcompany in 2001.
The group exhibition features a selection of their recent paintings, installations, sounds, videos and objects. Jan Lauwers will be showing a selection of his watercolours and will continue to build on his large-scale installation, titled “Silent Stories”. Grace Ellen Barkey will showcase some of her recent installations, which invite the spectator to step into and become part of her sensory world. Maarten Seghers creates spatial works, using sound as matter. The OHNO COOPERATION will present an infinite number of video portraits of Jan Lauwers and Maarten Seghers. Special guest William Forsythe will show one of his unique “Choreographic Objects”.
Open from 5.12.2019 to 15.12.2019, 13.00 - 19.00 uur
Open from 17.12.2019 to 26.01.2020, 13.00 - 18.00 uur
Closed on monday
Closed on 13, 14, 24, 25 & 31 december 2019 en 01 january 2020
Free
In collaboration with Cultuurcentrum Brugge and Concertgebouw Brugge
Jan Lauwers studied painting at the Academy of Art in Ghent. He works in just about every medium. Over the last thirty years he has become best known for his pioneering work for the stage with Needcompany, which was founded in Brussels in 1986. With his Epigonenensemble Jan Lauwers took his place in the movement for radical change in Flanders in the early 80s, and also made his international breakthrough.
In the course of this period he has also built up a substantial body of art work which has been shown at BOZAR (Brussels) and McaM (Shanghai) among other places. In 2014, he was rewarded with the ‘Golden Lion Lifetime Achievement Award’ at the Venice Biennale. He is the first Belgian to receive this prize in the theatre category. His work has been labelled as post-dramatic, and for the last few years he has been redefining this term. One of its most important characteristics is transparent, ‘thinking’ acting and the paradox between ‘acting’ and ‘performing’.
The artist, choreographer and performer Grace Ellen Barkey lives and works in Brussels and is a co-founder of Needcompany. Since 1992 she has been steadily and successfully building an international career with her own stage creations, whose nature lies where theatre, dance, live art and visual art meet. She is steadily building up a visual oeuvre of her own.
Her most recent installations form a study of the transposition from a space to a narrowness in which the viewer is invited to become part of a sensory work. She has been collecting, photographing and filming flowers, leaves and other flora for many years in her own town garden in Brussels and her immediate surroundings. “Beauty is only appealing when it is transient. Only then does it acquire a history.”
Grace Ellen Barkey is also one half of the artistic duo Lemm&Barkey, together with Lot Lemm. Their work has been exhibited at several museums including BOZAR (Brussels), Benaki Museum (Athens), Musée des Arts décoratifs (Paris), CC Strombeek, Dr. Guislain museum (Gent), Triënnale Hasselt/ Superbodies i.a
Maarten Seghers creates performances, video works, installations and music. He’s a member of Needcompany since 2001. In 2006 he set up OHNO COOPERATION in association with the artist Jan Lauwers and the musician Elke Janssens. The art practice of Maarten Seghers emerges from the desire to escape any form of definition, to refute and contradict any sort of stigmatisation. He understands the art of welcoming confusion and embracing chaos. His sculpture ‘Fountain (Late-Pornographic Balance) I’ (2010) is in the permanent collection of FRAC Nord-Pas de Calais.
Raised in New York and initially trained in Florida, William Forsythe danced with the Stuttgart Ballet, where he was appointed Resident Choreographer in 1976. After the closure of the Ballet Frankfurt in 2004, Forsythe established a new ensemble, The Forsythe Company, which he directed from 2005 to 2015.
Forsythe has been commissioned to produce architectural and performance installations by architect-artist Daniel Libeskind (Groningen, 1989), ARTANGEL (London,1997), Creative Time (New York, 2005), and the SKD – Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden (2013, 2014). His installation and film works have been presented in numerous museums and exhibitions, including the Whitney Biennial (New York, 1997), Festival d’Avignon (2005, 2011), Louvre Museum (2006), Pinakothek der Moderne in Munich (2006), 21_21 Design Sight in Tokyo (2007), Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus (2009), Tate Modern (London, 2009), Hayward Gallery, (London 2010), MoMA (New York 2010), ICA Boston (2011), Venice Biennale (2005, 2009, 2012, 2014), MMK – Museum für Moderne Kunst (Frankfurt am Main, 2015) and the 20th Biennale of Sydney, 2016.
Pictures: (c) Piet Goethals, Jean-Pierre Stoop, Phile Deprez
