Re(dé)couvrir (Dis)cover, 2016.
100 printed A4 tissue paper.
Theater filters: 53 × 73 cm.
Site-specific installation, exhibition Cent artistes en liberté,
Jewish Museum of Belgium, Brussels, May 2016.
Ephemeral installation evoking fragile layers of accumulated memories.
Poems about the war or dictatorship — from Anna Akhmatova, Yehuda Amihaï, Joseph Brodsky, Paul Celan, Varlam Chalamov, Jimmie Durham, Ingrid Jonker, Rustum Kozain, Ossip Mandelstam, Michael Ondaatjee, Rithy Panh, Yannis Ritsos and Wislawa Szymborska — and a mix of personal photographs with reframed press pictures are printed, in black and white for most of them, on tissue paper.
On the walls, the papers are accumulated and associated more or less at random. The pictures are small in order to invite the viewers to come closer. Thanks to their lightness, the papers seem to fly and float when someone passes nearby, sometimes right after having been reading the poems and looking at the photographs.
Some colored cut out theatre filters are superimposed on the two bottom panes of the window, creating a counterpoint, reversed reminder of the notions of accumulation and framing.
The place seemed even more appropriate for this installation as it is quite derelict — and to be soon demolished before being rebuilt —, but also because of its tormented and paradoxical past as it was used by the Gestapo during the Occupation, before becoming in the 70s the Jewish Museum, which underwent a murderous attack on May 24, 2014.
Entrance of the exhibition space.
Texts and pictures on the right wall.
Detail with Chinese migrants, poem from Ossip Mandelstam,
and a cloud with electrical wires.
Detail of superimposed printed papers.
Detail of flying papers
as someone passes nearby.
Colored cut out theatre filters superimposed on the window.
Angle between left wall and window.
Angle between entrance wall and left wall.
Detail left wall.
Accumulation of text, press pictures and personal photographs.
