EXTRACTIONS 26

For this edition, Kris Verdonck brought together a striking combination of works by international artists, including sculptures by Lucy Glendinning and Edith Dekyndt alongside pieces by Hans Bellmer, Yoran Cazac, Yuzuru Shoji, Tim Theo Deceuninck. Rough materiality is confronted with more tender, elegant compositions, destruction with endlessness. 

Kris Verdonck will present the poetic, moving landscape MASS #2, and spinning, floating rock DETAIL. Michael Schmid will be performing three sound works: PING (Samuel Beckett), I am sitting in a room (Alvin Lucier) and The real as imaginary (Peter Ablinger). 

EXTRACTIONS 26 | September | FREE  
Three two-day exhibition weekends with installations, performances and international works of art at the ATDC Atelier in Brussels.

EXTRACTIONS is an annual exhibition organized A Two Dogs Company and curated by Kris Verdonck, that takes place in the company’s studio in Molenbeek. EXTRACTIONS brings together the work of visual artist and theatre-maker Kris Verdonck with that of several like-minded artists. The selection of installations, new and mixed media, photographs, paintings, sculptures, performances and music is loosely connected by the idea of extraction and exploitation. 

Previous editions have explored mining, ecology, devastated landscapes, (digital) waste and technology, but equally the extraction of sound from objects and the ritual appropriation of forces. (In this manner,) Old, supposedly antique objects were (thus) brought together with more recent and new performative and visual work. This edition continues along those lines, bringing together works with a rougher materiality and more tender forms of desire. Elegance, vulnerability and destruction come together as two sides of the same coin.

A childlike doll lies in the fetal position, covered in dark feathers. Is it a dream image, a mutation, or an image of loss? Feather Child by Lucy Glendinning responds to the possibility of genetically modifying embryos and to fertility problems: a tender fantasy of something that does not (yet) exist, or no longer exists, somewhere between myth and biology. It thus reflects on both our power and our powerlessness. Glendinning’s Animal Drawings, a series of graphite and charcoal drawings depicting the trails left by snails on windows, provide an organic, spontaneous counterweight to the artificial. 

This seemingly soft form, confronting the harsh reality of the Feather Child, is placed alongside the works of Yoran Cazac. These brûlages, panels built up with layer upon layer of painted and repeatedly burned-off paint, become a post-apocalyptic landscape for the feathered figure and the traces of animals. As with the other works in the exhibition, the specific materiality and the way it is treated are of great importance.

The works of Edith Dekyndt also have a strong tactile quality. In The Magic Garden and Groupie Girl, a 3D-printed layer is applied over wooden branches. A synthetic blanket covering the natural material, a kind of “digital moss”, a new bark… these are just some of the many images evoked by these works. The combination of organic and inorganic materials acquires a sense of fragility while simultaneously conjuring an image of a new world. Dekyndt’s textile work Wreck, a large canvas on which shards of glass form a fragmented whole, oscillates between the wreck as suggested by the title and a state in which a fractured reality has become the new normal.

Dekyndt’s works resonate with Kris Verdonck’s installation DETAIL. DETAIL is a heavy boulder, suspended from a thin steel cable, that rotates around its own axis. It is a closed circuit powered by solar energy: the rock, therefore, turns to the rhythm of the sun. Simple yet relentless, caught between lightness and weight. Meanwhile, the photographs of Tim Theo Deceuninck shape the environment for these installations. They are prints on lead using natural emulsions: landscapes photographed from the perspective of animals. Two smaller works provide relevant accentuations. Hans Bellmer’s sketch of a trapeze artist brings the human figure back to the foreground, distorted and floating in the air. The landscape by Yuzuru Shoji brings together the cosmic and the materiality of paint, bringing it back “down to earth.” Between the mythical and the divine, and the physical, raw quality of the earth: this is the image of the exploited landscape that emerges in this exhibition.

During the first weekend, musician Michael Schmid will perform a distinctive combination of music and text. In Peter Ablinger’s The Real as Imaginary, Samuel Beckett’s Ping, and Alvin Lucier’s I’m Sitting in a Room, the voice balances between sound and word, between occupying the foreground and dissolving into the background. Verdonck’s MASS#2, which will be presented during the final two weekends, is situated somewhere in between as well. The ever-changing grey landscapes acquire an increasingly ominous significance after a summer of climate disasters. 

What is the place of the human voice in a devastated landscape? 

What can language still say about human experience, now that text and speech can be almost entirely artificially simulated, extracted from users and from everything that has ever been written and digitized?