Tentoonstellings- parcours

Besides the performance programme, you can lose yourself in the corridors of DE SINGEL among installations, objects and video works by Virgil Vernier, Linah Dalifa, Maika Garnica, Stef Van Looveren and Collectif Faire-Part.
 

Virgil Vernier - Arcana 1 (Antwerp)
Main entrance DE SINGEL and wall at Expozaal

On a pallet near the main entrance of DE SINGEL you will find a pile of posters, of which you can take some home. Cineast Virgil Vernier designed a series of twelve posters. The complete series can be seen in the corridor that leads to the exhibition hall. Each poster depicts a luxury watch. They are advertisement images from which Vernier has removed all text and logos. What remains are mythical images, sacred objects surrounded by a magical halo. The watches radiate something inviolable, an impenetrable mystery. It is as if each image repeats a mysterious commandment. While the world changes at full speed, time seems to have stood still here. In eternity, the watches become an artefact from the past. Transformed into a still life, the image of the watch becomes pure vanity.

Vernier is a productive filmmaker, he has released sixteen films, six of which are feature length. He is currently preparing a new short film and a new feature. Besides his film work, he also published the Arcana series. These publications consist of a collection of advertising images and images from popular culture. Vernier is interested in the symbolism behind these images. Specifically, he asks himself how the mechanism of mythologisation gives the images a different symbolic value. For CARTA '22 he presents a selection of twelve images in poster format. As a visitor, you can take them with you. Moreover, these posters will be distributed throughout Antwerp with the help of street artists.


Linah Dalifa - Mystery flags
Hallway cloakroom 

Artist Linah Dalifa has made flag installations her trademark. For her, flags are the symbol and instrument par excellence where a place is claimed for a certain discourse, identity or idea. Her flags are often presented in the form of activist actions in the urban space. In DE SINGEL a long row of flags occupies the central cloakroom corridor. The flags - which you can open and touch - repeat like a mantra the quote by writer Anna Michaels from her booklet Infinite Gradation. The quote and the texts are an important source of inspiration for CARTA '22. In Dalifa's work, Michaels' words are repeated, eroded, cut up, visually distorted. How can we understand the depth of her words? But equally, how can language become something superficial and sloganeering? In this way, the artist touches on a larger question concerning language as an unreliable medium. In an image-based world, language is often reduced to 'image'. Thus the only strategy for interpersonal communication loses its potential to form concepts and understanding.

Linah Dalifa is an elusive figure. She rarely shows her work within institutional contexts. Her field of action is the urban context. Her flags appear worldwide, often distributed by progressive activist groups. Thus, her work is exhibited within all kinds of protests or they are hung - often clandestinely - on flagpoles or public buildings.

 
Stef Van Looveren - Eye to Eye, 2022
Expo square Beel layer +1

Stef Van Looveren reworks their video work Radical Hope (2018) into a live performance. As a residue, a sculpture of a face is left behind on the Expo square of DE SINGEL. In the performance, the audience is taken through six installations. Each installation symbolises a phase in life, a phase in society, and an emotional phase. The Face Sculpture is linked to the emotional phase of resentment. In their work, Van Looveren reflects on the body as the intersection of judgements that transform the body into an unambiguous object. They go in search of the mechanisms behind this transformation. How can the body maintain a political ambiguity?

Stef Van Looveren is a multidisciplinary, non-binary artist. Van Looveren tries to analyse and dismantle the performativity of our human behaviour, mainly within the notion of gender. By playfully mimicking our social behaviour and visual culture, their work evolves into a surrealist gesture.


Maika Garnica - Instruments (Tuuun)
Corridor big stages

In the corridor behind the Blue and Red Halls, some unique instruments by artist Maika Garnica are on display. These instruments are part of her sound performance that will be performed twice during the CARTA `22 festival. For this performance, she will work with ceramic sound boxes. By using different heating procedures, Garnica creates ceramic plates that produce different sounds each time.
 
Garnica's sound instruments are the result of intuitive search processes for form and sound. In this search she applies various techniques that transform the clay into instruments with very distinctive sounds. In a short time, Maika Garnica has thus developed a unique collection of works of art. The instruments are brought to life in various performances she has developed. The interaction with other musicians and bodies is crucial in order to create new uses of the instruments and to develop new sounds.


Collectif Faire-Part - Video works
ON_OFF SPACE

In the ON_OFF_SPACE of DE SINGEL we present some video works by house artist Collectif Faire-Part. Collectif Faire-Part is an ensemble of Belgian and Congolese film makers. In varying constellations they develop shorter and longer video works, often on the crossroads between fiction and reality. In this video exhibition, the collective shows several new works in which they question the complex relations between Brussels and Kinshasa in various ways. They zoom in on impossible visa procedures for Congolese travellers, police violence in Brussels, anti-colonial medicine and disappearing monuments...

In the short film L'Escale/The Stopover (14 min., 2022), we watch breathtaking views from a plane, while listening to testimonies that give an insight into the impossibility for Congolese artists to travel carefree and safely. In 2019, filmmakers from Collectif Faire-Part, Paul Shemisi and Nizar Saleh travelled from Kinshasa to Frankfurt for the screening of their new film. During a stopover in Angola, they were stopped at the airport because the airline did not trust their documents. While Shemisi and Saleh thought they would be led to a hotel where they would stay until their return flight, they suddenly found themselves in an illegal detention centre. 

In a second short film, Speech for a Disappearing Statue (10 min., 2022), we listen to a speech by poet Marie Paule Mugeni. She is writing it for the day the statue of Leopold II in Brussels will finally be taken down from its pedestal. In the spring of 2020, thousands of people took to the streets of Brussels, in solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement, to raise their fist against police brutality and institutional racism. For a moment it seemed that this symbol of colonial glorification would fall. But to this day, the statue still stands.

Two video works in development will be announced later.