07 Feb 2017

ISELP presents Messidor: Some Arguments Later

Messidor was formed by Brussels and Ghent based artists Meggy Rustamova (°1985), Pieter Geenen (°1979), Sirah Foighel Brutmann (°1983) and Eitan Efrat (°1983) in order to discuss, to question and to practice the value of joining forces in today's artistic realm.

Some Arguments Later, Messidor's first monographic exhibition, is the outcome of a three-month residency that took place at ISELP between October and December 2016.

Some Arguments Later is an assembly of earlier and newer works. The gathered works negotiate physical and psychological meanings of sharing and dividing space. In Some Arguments Later, Messidor invites the audience to mediate amid the films and installations in an exhibition that examines notions of collectiveness and their representations in specific political and social realms.

Some Arguments Later was curated by Messidor and Florence Cheval.

---------

Additions and substractions¹
Messidor wasn't set up in order to produce artworks together. Rather, its mainspring is to share means of production, but also to reflect on the value of joining forces in today's artistic realm and, more importantly, to speculate together and to discuss issues that affect current political environments. Messidor constantly aggregates to its own constellation, for a short while or in the longer term, an infinity of colleagues - artists, curators or researchers from other disciplines.
The exhibition's title, Some Arguments Later, underlines Messidor's intention to think and set up an exhibition in the form of what they described as a 'polylogue'. An exhibition in which language is the exposing of plural singularity². All through the process of working together, the vehicle of additions and substractions was language. Furthermore, language is also essential in each one of Messidor's individual works.
Excess and lack
Inviting the viewer to take a closer and a longer look at each image, whether a still or a moving image, most of the time in a way that also involves language, each singular work reveals itself as a specific event. The event of an encounter that involves four protagonists at least—a camera, whoever stands behind the lens, whoever faces the lens, and whoever might become a spectator viewing the product of the encounter.³
The works open up encounters within but also outside the frame, questioning the 'this is it' of indexicality, of finger-pointing, of so-called objectivity, of the view from above, and so on and so forth, in order to interrogate the making of the archives, of categorizations, of history but also the sovereign power that often lies beneath the way images are framed, collected, and put in circulation.
Florence Cheval

_{^1. This title is borrowed from Raqs Media Collective, « Additions, Subtractions: On Collectives and Collectivities », Manifesta Journal #8, Collective Curating, ed. Viktor Misiano, 2009-2010.
² Jean-Luc Nancy, Being Singular Plural, Stanford University Press, 2000, p. 3.
³ Ariella Azoulay, Civil Imagination. A Political Ontology of Photography, Verso, 2015, p. 146.}

Related events



20.01.2017 19:00 Performance: Abstraction End and Things Like That by Hagar Tenenbaum
10.02.2017 18:00 - 19:30 Screening + Talk: Katharina Aigner
17.02.2017 18:00 - 19:30 Screening + Talk: Excursus by Sofia Lemos

10.03.2017 18:00-21:00
11.03.2017 15:00-19:00
Workshop: Secret Images by Daniel Mann and Laliv Melamed

19.03.2017 16:00-17:30 Performance: An Intellectual History of the Clock by Alexandra Laudo


--------

Save the date / 2017 / ISELP

SYNC !
Adrien Tirtiaux, Buktapaktop, Clovis XV, Enough Room for Space, Friche, Herman Byrd, Les commissaires anonymes, MISSSOURI, Muesli, PEZ Corp, VOID, …
31.03 > 11.06.2017 / Opening : 30.03.2017

Gisements – ébauches pour Recy K
Joachim Coucke, Adrien Tirtiaux, Thierry Verbeke
23.06 > 23.07.2017 / Opening : 22.06.2017