Commissioned by the Flemish Ministry of Culture for the Belgian Pavilion, 53rd International Art Exhibition—La Biennale di Venezia. Curator: Dirk Snauwaert

Kempens Informatieblad, was a newspaper published by Belgian artist Jef Geys between 1971 and 2018.

Since the early 1960s, in addition to his interlocking artistic and pedagogical work, Geys was also involved in the production and distribution of a local newspaper, the Kempisch Reklaamblad, on whose pages he began to publish various textual and pictorial material among the advertisements placed therein. After it was discontinued, Geys took over the paper and continued it under his own direction as Kempens Informatieblad.

Functioning as an alternative to the conventional artist catalog, the issues, over 50 in total, were mostly published in connection with his exhibitions. As an information system directed by the artist, it successively developed into a kind of meta-medium within his practice, through which he himself organized his representation and mediation—beyond the exhibition context.

Michel Foucault Letters documents artist Kevin Immanuel’s ongoing project archiving the supposed correspondence between the famous philosopher and a number of galleries and art institutions throughout Europe, North America, and China. The letters were, in fact, written by Immanuel himself, both as a literalization of Foucault’s emphasis on the importance of cultivating an “ironic stance” toward one’s present situation (in Immanuel’s case, the crisis of being a young artist trying to strike up a meaningful discourse with art institutions), and as a poignant critique of the relationship between art institutions and their patrons. Each letter contains a polite request to become a member of the institution, offers a monetary donation, and actively attempts to initiate a critical dialogue with the institution about its programming and exhibitions.

An artist publication produced by gerlach en koop, “One and a half second from the film ‘Late Spring’ by Yasujiro Ozu from 1949, shortly after one of the two main characters leaves the house of her friend in a hurry, and just before we see her walking down the street.”

The Los Angeles based artist Shannon Ebner extends her exploration of photography, sculpture and language in this remarkable book, The Sun as Error. In collaboration with Dexter Sinister (design duo David Reinfurt and Stuart Bailey), The Sun as Error re-investigates the meaning and language of photographs, creating both an open-ended reading of her practice and also rethinking the idea of an artist’s monograph. Far from straightforward, the book interweaves her bodies of work, previously unseen one-off pieces, with the language of technical diagrams, optical illusions, and graphic design. One of the persistent motifs through the book’s sequence is an asterisk and, specifically, one imbued with the legacy of the graphic designer Muriel Cooper. As the first design director for MIT Press and the cofounder of the Visible Language Workshop, Cooper’s legacy for reorienting and repositioning the direction of an artist’s monograph is imaginatively explored in the creative partnership of Dexter Sinister and Shannon Ebner.

Thea Djordjadze mainly works with sculpture although she has also realized performances and been involved in music projects. In her sculptures, she often uses perishable, fragile, everyday materials that are derived from the vocabulary of domesticity and may hint at femininity, such as plaster, ceramic, silicon, sponge, cardboard, textiles and soap. The shelves, railings, walls and boxes that support or encase the sculptural objects, are simple but delicate architectural structures of wood and metal. Their expression stands in stark contrast to the organic shapes and “unfinished” surfaces of modestly scaled sculptures propped against walls, resting on shelves or hanging from railings. These passive-aggressive configurations of conflicting but mutually dependent objects make cryptic and elliptical reference to the sculpture of classical modernism. The artist’s drawings and watercolours are often part of installations, doubling and heightening their expressive impact and also underlining the fragmentary, unfinished state of the work. They are neither preliminary sketches for future three-dimensional works nor are they studies of already existing sculptures or autonomous pieces. It is as if the sculptures were living bodies that have assumed a definitive shape and became motionless only for a moment—and the drawings have taken note of their temporary appearance.

With texts from Oksana Bulgakowa and Adam Szymczyk.

The work of Sanja Iveković has been seen only rarely in museums and art spaces in the Netherlands. This two-part exhibition aims to introduce a new audience to Iveković’s work, and seeks to provide an understanding of the artist’s practice by connecting her feminist voice to the social, political, and historical developments in general, and specifically to such realities in Croatia, her country of residence. Iveković’s body of work performs a crucial role in understanding how European art has developed over the past thirty-five years. This exhibition presents a selection of key works from Iveković’s oeuvre from the 1970s to today.

The exhibition at the Van Abbemuseum focuses on more historical work from before 1989, consisting primarily of photographic series, collages, and filmed performances. The works are installed around the large vertical space of the museum tower, where a newer monumental sculpture, realized originally as a public art project in Luxemburg in 2001, Lady Rosa of Luxembourg, is reconstructed.

At BAK, a selection of more recent work is shown, including three new productions, amongst which a new version of the well-known Women’s House, a collective portrait of women from a local shelter for abused women. The exhibition is also planned to extend into the public realm with Iveković’s proposal to rename a city street in Utrecht after the Unknown Heroine.