(© Sammy Ben Yakoub, Amblyopia)
We have known for some time now that something is stirring in the underground of the Brussels art scene. But while inventive initiatives by and for artists like w-o-l-k-e and Overtoon ascend to the tops of skyscrapers, Greylight Projects literally delves underground. In the enormous space under the Gésu Chapel in Sint-Joost/Saint-Josse, Wouter Huis, Naïla Akli, Marc Buchy, and Stéfan Piat have installed a new project space that aims to provide support to the development, production, and presentation of artistic projects. Greylight Projects Brussels is an extension of what artist Wouter Huis founded a number of years ago in Hoensbroek: “I was actually looking for an exhibition space in Brussels. When I found this building, I thought it would make the perfect studio, so I moved my own studio in the old Renold building along too. In Hoensbroek, a suburb of the Dutch town Heerlen, it was just the opposite: there I was looking for a studio and I was given a large building that would eventually become the home of Greylight Projects. I find it interesting to collaborate with other artists because of my own artistic practice, irrespective of the medium they use. Greylight Projects in Hoensbroek will continue to exist, it’s running well. But there we focus more on residences, while here – at least for the time being – we’ll focus on projects. But the boundaries are not defined and everything is very open. We’ll do whatever crosses our path.”
Delightfully beautiful monsters
The exhibition with which Greylight Projects will inaugurate its location in Brussels is “You Know/I Know: Something Closer” by visual artist Sammy Ben Yakoub (1980). The cross-eyed kid that graces the intriguing poster on the door of Greylight Projects and holds together the various media inside the exhibition, forms one leg of the triangle that supports the exhibition, completed by the two-part title: knowledge, the view, and distance are central. “The deafening explosion of information and images nowadays is impossible to survey. This is a truly apocalyptic phenomenon. The images flee, crawl, shift, and settle everywhere. These are interesting times to be an artist. How do you deal with all that in your work? What does art mean in the midst of an explosion?”
To Sammy Ben Yakoub, his artistic practice is a way of dealing with that multiplicity, that diversity of capricious images: “Yes, absolutely. It’s a way of being in the world. I have a love-hate relationship with those images. There are images that force themselves on you, images that expose themselves, and ones that sell themselves. Distant images are becoming increasingly rare. And all those disparate fragments have started blending together, producing hybrid forms, delightfully beautiful monsters! I explore the boundaries between digital images, film, found footage, manipulated images, and sound because that is where the elements of distance and hybridisation are most tangible. That’s where it happens!”
That hybridisation and transformation breaks the images open: “I adopt images, I kidnap them almost, take them out of their biotope, and in my own way, I make them receptive to new connections again. A new story is thus created from those images, though they never lose their particularity. What makes me very curious, like at this exhibition, is how all these different images start interacting with one another, how the various media very subtly start converging, so that at a certain point, it is impossible to distinguish video from photo or drawing, or even the look from the hand of the artist. A choreography thus emerges in the space, an interplay that is not univocal.” And in which the viewer plays an essential part: “Yes, I like to think of the viewer as a player, as someone who commits to playing the game I propose. But freely, because if you start compelling people you miss many fine things, such as the power a work of art might have.”
(Photo © Heleen Rodiers)
SAMMY BEN YAKOUB: YOU KNOW/I KNOW: SOMETHING CLOSER 5 > 29/9, do/je/Th > za/sa/Sa 12 > 18.00, Greylight Projects Brussels, rue Brialmontstraat 11, Sint-Joost-ten-Node/Saint-Josse-ten-Noode, www.greylightprojects.org
To Sammy Ben Yakoub, his artistic practice is a way of dealing with that multiplicity, that diversity of capricious images: “Yes, absolutely. It’s a way of being in the world. I have a love-hate relationship with those images. There are images that force themselves on you, images that expose themselves, and ones that sell themselves. Distant images are becoming increasingly rare. And all those disparate fragments have started blending together, producing hybrid forms, delightfully beautiful monsters! I explore the boundaries between digital images, film, found footage, manipulated images, and sound because that is where the elements of distance and hybridisation are most tangible. That’s where it happens!”
That hybridisation and transformation breaks the images open: “I adopt images, I kidnap them almost, take them out of their biotope, and in my own way, I make them receptive to new connections again. A new story is thus created from those images, though they never lose their particularity. What makes me very curious, like at this exhibition, is how all these different images start interacting with one another, how the various media very subtly start converging, so that at a certain point, it is impossible to distinguish video from photo or drawing, or even the look from the hand of the artist. A choreography thus emerges in the space, an interplay that is not univocal.” And in which the viewer plays an essential part: “Yes, I like to think of the viewer as a player, as someone who commits to playing the game I propose. But freely, because if you start compelling people you miss many fine things, such as the power a work of art might have.”
(Photo © Heleen Rodiers)
SAMMY BEN YAKOUB: YOU KNOW/I KNOW: SOMETHING CLOSER 5 > 29/9, do/je/Th > za/sa/Sa 12 > 18.00, Greylight Projects Brussels, rue Brialmontstraat 11, Sint-Joost-ten-Node/Saint-Josse-ten-Noode, www.greylightprojects.org
Read more about: Cultuurnieuws , Expo
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