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At the Middelheim Museum time is a constructive reality (featured by artist Kader Attia and the Cave Painters)

Surely one of the most important sculpture parks in Belgium, the Middelheim Museum in Antwerp hosts more than 200 outdoor artworks in its 30 hectares of gardens as well as running two exhibition spaces also within the limits of its park, the Braem Pavillion and Het Huis.

 

The latter is currently holding an exhibition by Kader Attia in which the French Algerian artist shows a series of hand carved busts made by African craftsmen from photos of disfigured soldiers who were recruited in those lands to fight World War One. The connection between imperialist past and today’s post-colonial discourse in Attia’s work functions as a politicised introduction to a recurrent theme we witnessed all across the museum: how the past translates into the present forming a “third ground” of critical interpretation.

 

The walk from Het Huis to the Braem Pavillion at the other side of the park is of great historical interest, leading to a gradual discovery of the vast outdoor collection of sculptures spanning more than one hundred years. However, the free path through the pieces as well as their scattered set up in the garden quickly make the spectator forget any idea of chronological order to prompt aesthetic and poetic associations. For instance, we imagined Constantin Permeke’s bronze Marie Lou (1935), an example of Belgian expressionism, approaching the nearby Bridge Without A Name by Ai Weiwei (2012) to share the discomfort of walking over its uneven surface or the very problematic being in the world (or state in the case of Ai’s China whose contours are the bridge’s decks).

 

At the end of the walk, the Braem Pavillion once again placed us in front of this constructive dialogue between the past and the present. At the moment, the space hosts the exhibition Allegory Of The Cave Painting – The Other Way Around, the second and complimentary episode of a much larger event held at Extra City Kunsthal, also in Antwerp. Both the shows share a very factual starting point: the Bradshaw rock paintings. These are pictures found in Australian caves dating back to prehistory whose pigments are being constantly restored by active bacteria which therefore maintain their original form. Taking these paintings as an allegory of an object whose time can no longer be pinned down, the whole exhibition at the Braem Pavillion seemed to be a sample of the very same kind.

 

Starting with the intervention of artist Ciprian Muresan called Dead Weights, for which the artist took more than a dozen sculptures by artists such as Pietro Consagra, Karl Hartung and Jacob Epstein out of the museum’s permanent collection to hide some of his engravings under them, making these pictures invisible pieces generated by the intrinsic physical property of older and ‘more’ historical artworks.

 

Along a similar way, Ann Veronica Janssens’ 22 April, 2014 consists of a magnifier installed in front of one of the pavilion’s windows with which we are asked to distort the shapes of the sculptures standing outside (including one by Janssens herself).

 

 

Finishing with Dan Graham, the artist’s contribution to the exhibition is the record of a performance called Past Future Split Attention he gave in London in 1972 which ironically functions as the perfect summary of a 2014 show (and museum). As the artist write about the piece: “two people who know each other are in the same space. While one predicts continuously the other person’s behavior, the other person recounts by memory the past behavior of the other”. Hearing the recording of this dialogue leaves the spectator in a state of temporal confusion and missed causality where time as a concept seems to loose its reliability in favour of a differently constructive approach to reality.

November 25, 2020