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19/2/2014

Franz Erhard Walther - Akram Zaatari

Wiels - Contemporary Art Center, Bruxelles

Franz Erhard Walther
The body decides

curated by Elena Filipovic

Franz Erhard Walther’s exhibition offers an in-depth look at an influential German artist whose pioneering work straddles minimalist sculpture, conceptual art, abstract painting, and performance all while positing fundamental questions about the conventional idea of the artwork as an immutable, obdurate pedestalor wall-bound thing. Bringing together pivotal works made between the 1950s and the present, this exhibition focuses on Walther’s ability to transform notions of objecthood and perception through drawings, paintings, fabric sculptures, participatory forms, languagebased works, photographic documentation and archival material.

Having participated in Harald Szeemann’s legendary When Attitudes Become Form (1969) and dOCUMENTA V (1972) as well as the Museum of Modern Art’s landmark Spaces (1970), Walther’s remarkable coupling of elementary forms with conceptual ideas and a radical rethinking of the relationship between sculpture and action, so influential to the contemporary practices of young artists today, deserves renewed attention. With his novel use of fabric forms, which he developed while in art school in the early 1960s, the artist’s aesthetics of actionincites visitors to engage with both sculpture and the institution in challenging ways.

The show at WIELS, the first for the artist in Belgium and one of the larger of his solo exhibitions to date, will underscore the essential tension provoked by Walther’s work and the ways it thinks about what and artwork can do, or what can be done with it as opposed to how merely it appears or what it is. The show will trace this tension via a sweeping panorama of the artist’s production, including more than one hundred works, while also drawing attention to the artist’s relationship to documentation, both photographic and drawn, and his fundamental conception of the exhibition itself as a platform for social action. It will include numerous objects to be manipulated in the exhibition and will be animated by several workshops and work demonstrations led by the artist.

Work demonstrations and public programs complementing the exhibition are realized in cooperation with the Goethe-Institut Brüssel.

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Akram Zaatari
This day at Ten

WIELS presents the first solo exhibition in Belgium by Lebanese-born, Beirut-based artist Akram Zaatari (b.1966). Zaatari showed one of the most celebrated works at last year's Venice Biennale, Letter to a Refusing Pilot, and brings this film installation to WIELS, together with three works that revolve around a letter, or the writing of a letter.

The title of the exhibition refers to Zaatari's cinematic essay from 2003, the similarly titled This Day. Ten years later, with the war in Syria escalating and unsolvable Israeli-Palestinian conflict, he uses the work as a prism through which to bring the past and the present into focus. Zaatari's work is a meditation upon images, their meaning and function, and the ways in which they circulate.

Closely linked with the practice of archiving and opening up a collection, he has developed a very personal montage style, open and documentary with subjective voice-overs or text overlays. Zaatari thus gives a voice to the people portrayed and the photographers, and juxtaposes these subjective documents with the great historical developments and conflicts of the age.

Zaatari profiles himself as one of the people spearheading the renewal of documentary filmmaking and photography, and more specifically as a lucid observer of images from the emotionally laden Middle East, a region that has long been divided and scarred by war. Providing evidence to counter Western stereotypes of the Arabs, their culture and nature is a driving force for both Zaatari and the Arab Image Foundation, of which he is a co-founder. Writing a letter is simultaneously both proof and testimony: a personal reaction to events, and the registration of what takes place. In the exhibition, during the excavation of The Letter for a Time of Peace (2007), we encounter the voice of a resistance actor from war in Southern Lebanon. Letter to a Refusing Pilot is an evocative, poetic narrative dedicated to the former Israeli pilot who refused to bomb the school in the city of Zaatari's birth.

Coordination: Dirk Snauwaert

Press & communication:
Micha Pycke +32 (0)2 3400051 micha.pycke@wiels.org

Opening: 20 february 2014, 18:30
With a work demonstration by the artist at 19:00

WIELS, Contemporary Art Centre
Av. Van Volxemlaan 354, 1190 Brussels
Opening hours
Wednesday – Sunday: 11.00 – 18.00
Nocturne: every 1st and 3rd Wednesday of the Month: 11.00 – 21.00
Closed: Monday – Tuesday
closed on Wednesday 25 December and on Wednesday 1 January
Tickets
8 € Individual visitor
5 € Students (+18), teachers, seniors (+60), groups (> 10 pers)
3 € Students (12–18), schoolgroups, unemployed
1,25 € Ticket ‘Article 27’
0 € Children (12 years old), accompanied by their parents
0 € Every first Wednesday of the month

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