Friday, 25 March, from 18 to 21 hours, the second BORGER Nocturne of the year will be taking place – reason enough for a trip to Antwerp. And if you're there anyway, add the weekend to your stay and visit the many excellent galleries in Antwerp, most of which are listed on GalleryViewer. There is plenty to discover for experienced and novice collectors alike. We have highlighted three gallery shows for you here.
BORGER Nocturne is an initiative involving galleries and art organisations in and around the districts of Borgerhout, Berchem and Zurenborg in Antwerp. Four times a year, they organise a joint NOCTURNE that gives visitors the opportunity to follow the BORGER art route in the evening, preferably on foot or by bicycle.
Participating galleries and exhibitions include DMW GALLERY: Emilie Terlinden & Lucie Lanzini; BASE ALPHA Jonathan Vervoort; NUMBERED BY: Florian Tomballe; EVA STEYNEN.DEVIATION(S): Nick Hullegie & Maarten Janssen; OTTY PARK: Midnight Blue; Eva De Leener; WILDER: The gardeners spring 2022; PIZZA GALLERY: Pee Wee's Big Adventure, ZENO X Gallery: Pélagie Gbaguidi; ZEIT: Nienke Baeckelandt, Fiona Koene, Antonia Lambelé, Carianne Wijffels; INGRID DEUSS: Oona Bovri
ZENO X Gallery: Pélagie Gbaguidi
‘Le jour se lève’ is the first solo exhibition by Pélagie Gbaguidi (°1965) at Zeno X Gallery in Borgerhout, featuring new paintings, textiles and drawings. Pélagie Gbaguidi considers herself a contemporary ‘griot’: someone who connects an individual memory with an ancestral past. Her work is a portrayal of signs and traces of trauma and a confrontation with colonial and post-colonial histories. She emphasises how systems of oppression are often omitted or circumvented in official history and thus continue to prevail. She recontextualises archives and stories to reveal and counter the process of forgetting. Her works are not direct representations of a traumatic past, but convey embodied knowledge. The images Gbaguidi creates – through paintings, drawings, installations or performance – challenge binary thinking, archetypes and simplifications.
Base-Alpha Gallery: Jonathan Vervoort
The title of the exhibition, ‘You came, You saw, You continued scrolling’, brings to mind Plutarch’s Julius Caesar and his iconic phrase ‘Veni, vidi, vici’ (‘I came, I saw, I conquered’) from circa 47 BC. Today, most of us feel less and less like victors and more like the vanquished. Every day, we seem to get more deeply entangled in the web of digital existence. Vervoort's paintings do not offer a remedy, but reflect on this train of thought. Strongly influenced by the digital part of our existence, Vervoort explores the boundaries between the digital and the analogue. His paintings consistently adopt old oppositions – analogue/digital, expressive/rational – and blur the boundaries between these, questioning the position of the painting itself.
Eva Steynen.Deviation(s): Nick Hullegie & Maarten Janssen
Hullegie & Janssen, who respectively live in Belgium and the Netherlands, graduated from the Arnhem Art Academy in 1996 and work together regularly, including in the exhibition ‘Framed’ currently on show at Eva Steynen's gallery. The installation consists of several drawings, each created as a single work, that together reveal the joy of a tangible, shared experience, while at the same time challenging the concept of individual authorship. Looking for a starting point for this adventure, Hullegie & Janssen found shared inspiration in drawing. The piles of drawings of autumn leaves covering the gallery floor refer to natural disorder as an archetype of the creative spirit of both artists, a controlled chaos that provides spaces for new ideas. During the creation process, Hullegie & Janssen invented their own rules of the game, which in turn generated new rules.