Travelling through the mind

(Beach Pond © Arno Rafael Minkkinen)

La Centrale Électrique/De Elektriciteitscentrale is taking a new course. Renamed “Centrale for Contemporary Art”, it has a new artistic director, Carine Fol. “Mindscapes”, an exhibition presented in the context of the Summer of Photography, is her baptism of fire.

Carine Fol spent ten years as director of Art & Marges, the Brussels museum for outsider art. A few months ago she took up the post of artistic director of the Centrale for Contemporary Art. She is still tidying up a few loose ends at Art & Marges, but will eventually devote herself full-time to her new responsibilities. “Mindscapes”, which sets itself the task of “making the invisible visible”, is her opening gambit.
The exhibition combines historical photography with work by contemporary Belgian and foreign photographers. There are quite a few big names on show, including Dirk Braeckman, Els Opsomer, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Andreas Gursky, and Francesca Woodman. Fol lifted a corner of the veil for us: “The exhibition is really constructed like a film screenplay. It is made up of two parts. The first shows photographs from the 19^th century that are about the medium of photography. There are photographs on show of bodies in a state of trance and bodies that disappear. The second part is about the subjective landscape. The link between the two parts is Bill Viola’s The Reflecting Pool, a video in which a man goes for a walk in the countryside. Suddenly he comes to a standstill before a swimming pool. He jumps into the air, but stays hovering there. It is a typical Viola work, about transcendency. The exhibition ends with an excerpt from David Lynch’s Lost Highway.”
The “Mindscapes” exhibition, organised as part of the Summer of Photography, interprets the festival’s overall landscape theme in a pretty broad sense. “I find it interesting to combine landscape with the human perspective,” explains Fol. “It’s not just about landscape, but also about reality. Some of the photographs depict the invisible. Concepts such as absence, feelings, religion, trance, madness… How do photographers convey them? But it’s just as much about the feeling a photographer can have when standing before a landscape.”

(The Reflecting Pool © Bill Viola / Talking to Vince © Francesca Woodman)

The exhibition offers a foretaste of the future focuses of Fol’s programming. “I want to work along three main lines. First, the Brussels identity: I want to place internationally known Brussels artists such as Els Opsomer and Emilio López-Menchero in a broader, international context. I will do that by combining their work with that of a foreign artist. Secondly, there will be group exhibitions: these could be thematic, like ‘Mindscapes’, but they could also be devoted to major collections. And finally I would like to organise triennales of the Brussels art schools. And I would also like to invite a foreign school each time.” But we will have to wait a while for that: the first triennale, with Berlin as guest, is due to take place at the end of 2014.

MINDSCAPES • 27/6 > 30/9, di/ma/Tu > zo/di/Su 10.30 > 18.00, €2,50/4/5
Centrale for Contemporary Art Sint-Katelijneplein 44 place Sainte-Catherine, Brussel/Bruxelles, 02-279.64.35, cultuur@brucity.be, www.lacentraleelectrique.be