Gleanings

Galerie Les filles du calvaire in Paris has invited curator Lise Bruyneel to shape a winter narrative. The exhibition ‘Dans tes brumes’ is an intimate gathering of works — by Dirk Braeckman, Julie Calbert, Katrien De Blauwer, Antoine De Winter, Renée Lorie, Stéphanie Roland, Dries Segers, Lore Stessel and Laure Winants — that unfolds as a visual poem, a meditation on the invisible forces that shape us, both collectively and individually. It offers a delicate moment, an opportunity to discover, in Paris, the work of some of Belgium’s finest contemporary photographers.

Here, the exhibition becomes an experience of disappearance: a space suspended between presence and absence, like the quiet dissipation of fog at dawn. In ‘Dans tes brumes’, the works are not merely things to look at, but environments to get lost in. They evoke the unseen, the forgotten, the sudden silences — those gaps where the city’s energy hums and falters. The weather of the world, its conditions of impermanence and fading, make the works seem to breathe in and out with the visitors, who in turn find themselves becoming part of the landscape — vanishing, momentarily, from their own awareness. The exhibition flirts with possibility and wonder: the intersection of science and science fiction. It plunges us into icy waters and into the depths of glaciers where colour gradients emerge like secret codes. In the midst of a planetary crisis that threatens to erase so much, the works on show offer a confrontation with our own fragility, with the transient nature of all things, especially the fleeting moments of connection that form the core of our humanity. Yet, for all this, the atmosphere is not one of mourning. (Els Roelandt)

Curated by Anne Pontégnie, this solo exhibition features recent paintings and drawings by McArthur Binion (1949), as well as an array of earlier artworks, including some from the 1980s. The addition of earlier paintings demonstrates the consistency of his geometric abstraction across decades. Although Binion’s career has certainly picked up over the past decade, especially after his inclusion in the 2017 Venice Biennale, he appears to have worked steadfastly over multiple decades, opting to exhibit periodically, a strategy perhaps intended to avoid the burnout overexposure engenders. The same year he finished his MFA, he moved to New York City and was included in a three-person exhibition, curated by Carl Andre, Sol LeWitt and Ronald Bladen, at Artists Space. Ever since, he’s been associated with abstract painting. Two decades later he moved to Chicago to take the position of Professor of Art at Columbia College.

Binion’s colorful paintings begin with a ground, which he terms the work’s ‘underconscious’: black-and-white laser-prints of an image, such as photographs of his telephone book, his passport photo, his childhood home or his birth certificate. For this reason, some critics term his genre ‘autobiographical abstraction.’ At first glance, several of his paintings appear to be grids created with oil sticks. Upon closer inspection, however, one realises that the little squares are highly irregular, despite the abundance of horizontal and vertical lines.

In addition to his paintings’ biographical references, several paintings titled Visual: Ear (all 2023 and 2024) link his visual patterns to either improvised jazz or blues tunes, while ten from 2014 (all titled Haints) suggest malicious ghosts and evil supernatural beings. Most Haints paintings feature a silhouette of the US state of Mississippi — a former slave state with a history of brutal massacres and killings that continue today — decorated with abstract patterns evocative of Kente cloth. (Sue Spaid)

Given Katharina Sieverding’s interest in historical events, archives and self-portraiture, this fifty-year survey highlights the document as a starting point. A Düsseldorf Akademie student during the late 1960s, Sieverding shows black-and-white photos of students protesting alongside Joseph Beuys. Her very first film is also on view, Life–Death (1969/2004), a 35-minute 16 mm film that premiered at documenta 5. Ever since her first solo exhibition at Galleria L’Attico, her images have referenced events depicted in newspapers, magazines and films. One finds images of Germany’s anti-terrorism unit clipped from Der Spiegel, the repatriation of Bosnian orphans sourced from Rheinische Post, newspaper images of Italian soldiers preparing to deploy to Albania and a film still from an Alfonso Beato film featuring a Puerto Rican worker reflecting on his immigration to New York. As Sieverding puts it, ‘I update images from collective memory and work with the attractiveness of press pictures, while trying to question the momentary fasciation that mass images hold: what is behind the propaganda for the here and now?’

A critic of the disassociated photograph, Sieverding’s images draw connections between events to layer meanings. For example, 3 Encode VII (2006) superimposes an image of the model for the Sachsenhausen concentration camp over an image of Berlin’s Holocaust Memorial. Her titling sixteen early self-portraits Stauffenberg-Block I-XVI/1969 after Claus von Stauffenberg recalls Hitler’s failed 1944 assassins. Sieverding considers her face ‘the most obvious medium of self-reflection.’ As if to question the significance of Germany’s sudden reunification in the wake of the European Union’s formation, she asked a knife thrower to deface her 1992 self-portrait. GROSSFOTO XII/1979, 1977 layers a Chinese cutout of the revolution with a mass demonstration in Teheran, celebrating Khomeini’s 1979 return. For XXVIII/1987 Kontinentalkern [Continental Core] VI, she superimposed a photo of a solar eruption over a radiological image of a tumor. Other photographs reference the nuclear arms race, dictators, occupation and borders. Since the early 1970s, she has also collaborated with Klaus Mettig. (Sue Spaid)

Coming soon to La Loge is a version of ‘A Hollow and Broken: A State of the World,’ the solo exhibition by Gülsün Karamustafa (1946) on view in the Türkiye Pavilion during the 2024 Venice Biennale. This exhibition, which features multiple large-scale elements juxtaposed with a black-and-white video, makes a strong statement regarding the human costs of economic and political exploitation. On view are several huge metal bins containing glass shards plus three Murano-glass chandeliers handcrafted from discarded Venetian glass and enveloped in barbed wire. Dispersed throughout are PVC moulds for casting columns and Corinthian crowns. Evocative of ancient Greek sites such as Ephesus, the moulds are either propped up with metal poles or surrounded by fencing.

As it turns out, none of the ingredients needed to make glass (sand, soda ash and natural gas for the furnaces) are found on Murano. Even so, these islands were the world’s primary source for mirrors and glass beads for several centuries. These objects thus set the stage for visitors to reflect upon the environmental impact of global trade wars, energy-intensive industries such as Murano’s glass factories, the rise and fall of civilisations and the hegemonic strategies of domination and control that have made colonisation, resource exploitation and now climate change inevitable outcomes.

The privilege arising from global trade, industry and development is contrasted with the anxiety, sadness and despair apparent in a silent montage of film clips (likely newsreels). The viewer is suddenly transported to twentieth-century conflicts on every continent. One notices mass protests in various countries, refugees fleeing hither and thither, Pakistanis being chased by British police, starving people, pushing crowds and people escaping borders through holes in fences. With these clips, one witnesses people’s indefatigable wills and their sheer desire to survive against all odds. (Sue Spaid)

Leonor starts her work of weaving already within the title of her exhibition, which takes place across two floors of CAM (Centro de Arte Moderna Gulbenkian) this winter in Lisbon. ‘The constant inequality of leonor’s days’ refers to the title of a drawing by Ana Hatherly, also included in the show. For the drawing, titled on the persistent inequality of Leonor’s days, Hatherly continuously copied out lines by the sixteenth-century Portuguese poet Luis Vaz de Camoes — ‘Barefoot she walks to the fountain / Leonor through the greenery / Beautiful and uncertain she goes’ — until reaching illegibility. Through a gesture of weaving in several temporalities, by which she brings them close to herself, Antunes prepares us for an exhibition of meaningful encounters with little explanations. She lets affects speak for themselves.

After a deep dive into the CAM’s collection, Antunes assembled her own personal selection of works for the exhibition, which she installed in an intuitive manner (this approach is characteristic of her way of working). In the mezzanine of the building, she presents works by Portuguese female artists such as Hatherly, Helena Almeida and Maria Helena Vieira da Silva.

Antunes constantly engages herself with the architecture of the building, its scale and history. A commissioned floor sculpture on the ground floor unifies the space in which her suspended sculptures hang, offering a play of transparencies, fullness and emptiness, measurements and intuition. These literally entangled, braided, woven and hung works echo the multiplicity of relations portrayed in the mezzanine.

In the spirit of her attraction to unlearning, she leaves the white walls bare and suspends the works from the collection on wooden panels, which are themselves a reappropriation of Charlotte Perriand’s voilets and Lina Bo Bardi’s glass easels.

Enchantingly, this show is as much about the works displayed as about the multiplicity of relations evoked through appropriation, undoing, referencing and naming. It reminds us that our heritage is an ongoing collective work, abundant in more and less visible and (maybe especially) invisible interdependencies. (Agata Jastrząbek)