Mondo Cane
Published by the Belgian Pavilion, Fédération Wallonie-Bruxelles, Brussels, 2019, exhibition guide, 22 pages, (b/w ill.), 10.4 × 15 cm, English
Price: €6
Mondo Cane presents itself as a local folkloric museum that displays the human figure. Silent, pale and frightened, the pavilion’s inhabitants appear as aestheticized shells, stuck in a loop of formal activity that the visitor perceives as odd and out of touch with contemporary reality.
Jos de Gruyter and Harald Thys have the habit of distilling fictions out of a reality that is, sometimes, ‘too real.’ Both willingly concede that they feel attracted to the psychotic state of contemporary societies, a state that they simultaneously dread and disseminate in their work.
Designed by Boy Vereecken and Antoine Begon.