What will the world look like 100 years from now?
In Marc Bijls’ catalogue for a fictional survey exhibition in the year 2084, published by JapSam Books, time comes to us from the future. Bijl considers himself an observer of society, of everyday conditions and contemporary culture. In a society structured by narratives and fictions, by immaterial scripts that insinuate themselves into lifestyles, institutions, and ideology, he turns his attention to concealed myths, codes and structures that order everyday life. He leads us into the year 2084 and from there, back to the aesthetics of the 1980s. In a body of work that forms a critically purposeful montage of observations, Bijl playfully combines methods of appropriation and deconstruction, drawing from counter-cultural traditions and the real-time iconography of “high” and “low” culture alike. The works that result from the appropriated and manipulated sources (in media including painting, installation, sculpture, video, posters, stickers and legally marginal interventions in public space) are unfailingly inventive within the artist’s unique stylistic idiom, which bears the influence of pop, punk and goth culture.