Expo van de week: Head Spinning Summer Thoughts

Twenty pages of ongoing correspondence in a stripped down, white space. In “Summer Thoughts”, the Brussels-based artist Sven Augustijnen shows nearly nothing, but this nearly nothing is enough to make your head spin.

At the 1937 Paris Expo, the Norwegian artist Hannah Ryggen exhibited her tapestry Etiopia, a response to Mussolini’s invasion of Ethiopia, beside Picasso’s Guernica. On the Norwegian island where she lived, she used to hang her razor-sharp, hand-woven social critique on a clothes line outside her house, in full sight of the Nazi occupiers.

It is likewise from Norway that Léon Degrelle, the Belgian politician who founded the fascist movement Rex in 1936 and later joined the Waffen-SS, fled to Franco’s Spain on Albert Speer’s airplane, after being sentenced to death in Brussels in 1944. When Anders Breivik attacked the government building in Oslo in July 2011, one of Ryggen’s works, which was hanging at the entrance, got damaged.

Sven Augustijnen’s “Summer Thoughts” oscillate from Norway to Brussels, from the Spanish Civil War to World War II, from a youth in Mechelen to the Balkans, all the while connecting dots. His exhibition at Jan Mot is an overwhelming experience, even though at first sight there doesn’t appear to be much to see. Apart from a 1983 episode of the Spanish debate programme La Clave, featuring Léon Degrelle as a notable guest, and a number of books (about Ryggen, Felix Nussbaum, Hitlers Kameramann und Fotograf Walter Frentz, and the Brussels cellars of the Gestapo on Avenue Louise), the completely stripped down, white space of the gallery has twenty sheets hung simply on the wall.

They are twenty pages of ongoing correspondence (dated between 23 July 2012 and 14 January 2018) between the artist and Marta Kuzma, who curated a 2012 exhibition of Hannah Ryggen’s tapestries at Documenta, the exhibition of contemporary art that takes place in Kassel every five years. It is hardly anything, and yet so much.