Lidwien van de Ven, Vincent Meessen and Mohamed El baz

Freedom – Lidwien van de Ven

With her introverted and intense black and white photographs Lidwien van de Ven (°1963, NL) focuses on issues of politics and religion while she postulates questions concerning the expressiveness of journalistic images. Her photos do not reveal their different layers of meaning at once, for they are poised upon the border between the visible and invisible, where the documentary, poetic and disturbing are brought together in a careful balance.

The photograph, Paris, 12/26/2006 (Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité) shows a nighttime street in the Marais. Current political controversies often make references to the three concepts that appear in this work. Simultaneously, they are also a part of the history of this particular Parisian district. This image and these words are the basis for the artist installation.

My Last Life – Vincent Meessen

In his exhibition entitled My Last Life, Vincent Meessen (°1971, BE/US) lines out an ambitious plot involving “Herbé”, a double character of the author and critic Roland Barthes. Vincent Meessen fits Barthes, himself the writer of the famous Mythologies, within the mold of the ultimate “mythological” project: namely the artist who transcends his role as creator to occupy a role as a character within his work. Besides this conceptual and critical approach of the writer, Meessen presents colonial figures that were both a part of Barthes’s writings and his real life. Was his grandfather not Louis-Gustave Binger, the ‘explorer-traveler’ who annexed the Ivory Coast to the French Empire? In his critically-acclaimed film Vita Nova, through sculptures and photographs, Meessen proposes a case study on the necessity to build singular critical apparatus in order to think the relations between modernity and coloniality in all their complexity.

Bricoler l’incurable.détails – Mohamed El baz

As an artist, Mohamed El baz (°1967, MA) has only one goal before him: to fix the things around him, in his own words “the irreparable.” In his work El baz explores the notions of borders and territories, especially those what would raise barriers between individuals. El baz plays upon three themes in his work: the everyday, the autobiographical and the playful. The work itself is nomadic and transforms itself according to the context.