Magical Realism at Wiels

As it turns out, the show isn’t stuffy at all. In a grand effort, the construction crew of Wiels built a straightforward labyrinth of walls that form new spaces on the three main floors, so that each and every installation (and it is mostly installations) gets its own space to breathe and to be. The third floor is an exception; at the back, the space opens up into a single bright room where artistic positions can comfortably mingle. Each of the main floors opens with an outstanding international position: Suzanne Jackson on the first floor, Gaëlle Choisne on the second and Cecilia Vicuña on the third.

To start the show with the airy sculptures of the African American artist Suzanne Jackson is already a compelling argument for a good exhibition. The partially see-through acrylic objects are infused with colours and consist of materials such as (fruit) nets, tablecloths, scarves, threads, paper; they are suspended from the ceiling by transparent plastic threads, giving the impression that they are levitating. The sculptures are like jellyfish floating in an ocean of garbage, at the end of the season when the sea is filthy and most of the seasonal tourists have gone back home. Jackson’s hybrid objects are constructed out of materials both natural and artificial, which function as gestures and layers of paint; they occupy a world between sculpture and painting. The pieces on display at Wiels evolved organically from experiments with canvas in her studio, where a playful attitude towards media and formats plays a key role.

Jackson once said in an interview, ‘The reason I was able to experiment and do the work that I’m doing now is because nobody paid any attention.’ People have been paying attention for a while now. Suzanne Jackson, who is in her 80s, not only spearheaded significant multi-disciplinary and experimental developments in the arts; she has also dappled in costume design, scenography, dance, choreography and printmaking, although she remains best known for her paintings and the representation of the underrepresented in her curatorial work. Gallery 32, the art space she ran from 1968 to 1970, paved the way for Black women artists such as Senga Nengudi and Betye Saar, and also exhibited work by David Hammons. One can sense a similar agenda at work behind the exhibition at Wiels. Although the focus here isn’t on underrepresented artistic positions per se, ‘Magical Realism’ makes an effort to highlight positions that diverge from those of the Eurocentric, white, mostly male conceptual artists we are accustomed to seeing in this context.

The installation on the third floor by Jackson’s contemporary, the Chilean poet, artist and activist Cecilia Vicuña, has a similar feel to it, albeit with lighter materials and methods of manipulation. NAUfraga, originally commissioned for ‘The Milk of Dreams’ at the 59th Venice Biennial, is a hanging mobile made up of over 161 objects, including loose twisted wires, macramé-like knotted cords, dried plants, wood, jute sacs and fishnets.

The installation combines the quipus, interpretations of the Andean coding system that uses the knotting of coloured threads to record information, and the precarios, anti-monumental sculptures consisting mostly of found materials. Vicuña calls these works Arte Precario, to distinguish them from Arte Povera. Although both emphasise the provenance of materials, Vicuña’s Art Precario is precarious in every sense of the word — about to die, about to disappear at any moment. By contrast, Arte Povera is monumental in its materials and set to last a while. Both terms came about around the same time, although Vicuña only found out about Arte Povera years later. Over time, her practice evolved towards collective rituals and oral performances that allow her art to exist in many media and languages at once.

Both Suzanne Jackson and Cecilia Vicuña were born in the 1940s, the period when the literary genre of magical realism, the exhibition’s namesake, was being invented in Latin America. The genre can be traced back to oral storytelling, which has existed in all cultures in some form. This was how the world was explained before oral history traditions were disenfranchised by the world of science and hard facts. As a literary genre, magical realism was born when the uncanny, the ghostly and the magical entered the realm of socialist-realist storytelling, establishing a mechanism for generating critical distance. With that, it became politicised and moved from pre-colonial to ‘post-colonial’ narratives that question the austhenticity and righteousness of Western storytelling. It is exactly this sweet spot that the exhibition is trying to locate.

Vicuña’s works fit comfortably in this space between the magic and the real, the object and the oral. While Vicuña, through her work, ‘forg[es] a tactile connection between the earthly and the cosmic’, thus vertically connecting things diametrically opposed, the Brussels-based duo mountaincutters horizontally connect one corner of the building with the other. Their installation on the roof of Wiels, unfurling across a length of stretched metal cable, definitely feels akin to Vicuña’s precarious objects — it offers an alternative horizon to Brussels and at the same time functions as a kind of clothesline, holding seemingly washed-up objects in place. Copper wires ensnare the tightly wound metal cord, conjuring a flux of energy sizzling through to the blown glass objects (hands and disks), hammered brass metal plates and thick robes that adorn it. The work’s title, Shake the river bed, makes me think of Brussels’ forgotten river, the S/Zenne, which was largely covered over in the nineteenth century to facilitate urban development. It is regularly ‘cleaned’ by magnet fishers ¹ and its rusty objects every so often trail the sides of the waterside promenades. They look suspiciously like the objects spanned across the horizon at Wiels.

While I am lost in my own thoughts on the aftermath of industrialisation and its left-over sites and objects, a gurgling sound reaches my ears through the open door of the staircase. I follow its call down to the second floor landing, where a small balcony opens up to the ‘void’ of the Wiels building, its former silo. I can make out a small light at the top of the void, accentuated by a now loud and rhythmic choir of voices and water sounds. It is the site-specific installation Running Towards the Assembly of Things, by the young Brazilian artist Jota Mombaça. The work was conceived as a response to the water crisis in Mexico City, which was famously built on the bed of a lake. The city holds the record for being the world’s fastest-sinking metropolis, descending at a rate of 40 to almost 50 centimetres a year. Mombaça mirrors this fact by slowly lowering the light bulb 40 cm a time, until it reaches the bottom of the silo at the end of the exhibition in September.

I begin to perceive the underlying thread I was looking for, the red strings on the evidence board of my imagination have been drawn. The exhibition keeps its promise of opening a world that carries elements of both the magical and the real, without getting lost in either. Seen in this light, the opening words of Cecilia Vicuña could function as an epigraph for the exhibition as a whole: ‘Life has a strength that is so majestic and beyond our comprehension, and yet at the same time it can be destroyed. And so perhaps I imagine the strength of a work is a focus on what nobody sees. Perhaps there is a thirst, perhaps there is a desire to recover our complete humanness.’ A humanness that can incorporate all of us, with all of our parts.