Belgian Pavilion
56th international art exhibition - Biennale di Venezia
9 May - 22 November 2015
Curator: Katerina Gregos
The Belgian Pavilion at the 56th Venice Biennale will present the work of the Belgian artist Vincent Meessen (Baltimore, 1971, lives in Brussels), together with international guest artists. His project Personne et les autres breaks with the tradition of Belgium’s representation in Venice to date, which has mostly featured solo or duo exhibitions of Belgian artists. The artist’s project, selected to represent Belgium at the Biennale, challenges the notion of national representation, by moving away from the traditional format of a solo show and opening up to include multiple positions and voices.
Working in close collaboration, Meessen and Brussels-based curator Katerina Gregos have developed an international, thematic, discursive, contemplative group exhibition of a poetic as well as political nature, which is grounded in research-based practices. The exhibition welcomes ten other artists from four continents and – for the first time in the Pavilion – artists from Africa, all of whose work has probed the question of colonial modernity, and most of who are producing new work for the exhibition.
The title of the exhibition, Personne et les autres, is borrowed from a lost play by André Frankin, a Belgian art critic affiliated with the Lettrist and Situationist Internationals. The exhibition takes the history of the Belgian Pavilion and the international context of the Biennale (both derived from the colonial exhibitions and world expositions) as its points of departure to explore the consequences of political, historical, cultural and artistic entanglements between Europe and Africa during the time of colonial modernity, and in its aftermath. The Belgian Pavilion itself was the first foreign Pavilion to be built in the Giardini in Venice, during the reign of King Leopold II. Meessen’s own work and artistic research have consistently explored and questioned the history and afterlife of colonial modernity.
