Part 3: The Visitor’s Phantasy of the Artist as the Absent Foreigner

5OU6ÎLES (Lyon) is a contemporary art center of one square meter, 15 cm deep, located on the first floor of the Tomé café, and visible 24 hours a day from rue Romarin. It floats slightly above ground level and its program follows the rhythm of the seasons. It is part of a network of Showcase Galleries initiated by the Czech group bj (Josef Bolf, Jan Mancuska, Jan Serych, Tomas Vanek) in the late 1990s. 5OU6ÎLES follows its initial goal which is to share works in a place not identified with art worlds—street corners, stairwells, and bus shelters. 5OU6ÎLES is led by Éléonore Pano-Zavaroni and Fabien Renneteau (Idoine) with the support of Marianne and Sylvain (Tomé), and the complicity of Système Sensible.

Shahin Afrassiabi was born in Tehran. He studied art at Goldsmiths University in London. He works in Andalucia, Spain. Selected solo exhibitions include Paintings 2016–2018 at Soy Capitán, Berlin (2018); Radical Substance at Soy Capitán, Berlin (2015); Theory of Life at MOT International, London (2012); Subject to Form at Limoncello Gallery, London (2010). Afrassiabi’s work was part of several group shows, such as Been Caught Stealing at Kunsthalle Exnergasse, Vienna (2014), Showcase Preview at South London Gallery, London (2004); Transmission Gallery, Glasgow (2002); Early One Morning, Whitechapel Gallery, London (2002) and ICA, London (2000).

Steve Van den Bosch focuses on the seemingly expressionless, tacit and unspectacular. His work results from zooming in on the boundary between invisibility and pure materiality and puts the implications of artistic production, exhibition and interpretation into perspective with a taste for the absurd. By erasing, doubling, blurring, reversing or reconnecting the elements that define a work of art, objects and situations are created that continually undermine their own status as works of art and almost casually refer to the surrounding conditions from which work can emerge and in which it is subsequently exhibited. Van den Bosch was a resident at HISK in Antwerp (1998–2001) and the Rijksakademie van beeldende kunst in Amsterdam (2006–07). He obtained a doctorate in visual arts at the University of Antwerp in 2016. Van den Bosch currently teaches at LUCA Brussels.

From 2003 till 2021 DE PLAYER (Rotterdam) was a polymorhpic production platform in Rotterdam, which has been putting together programs on the cutting edge of performance art, experimental music and the visual arts. Since the advent of the club, their program has been presented to the public in a happening-style setting, comparable to the Dadaist salons—lots of activity and tumult, drinking and socialising, whilst all along there was an innovative, substantive program on offer. The ambiance was not that of a concert hall (black box) nor that of the gallery (white cube) but what we could term a ‘grey dome’; a twilight zone. From 2021 it changed into a physical magazine titled DE_LAYER.

Enterprise Projects (Athens) is an Athens-based project by Danai Giannoglou and Vasilis Papageorgiou. “Created out of our need to express and share our point of view concerning the contemporary artistic creation, this venture aims at experimenting and conversing; experimenting with the curatorial proposal, artistic creation, self-organized function, and conversing with the artistic scene, the Athenian audience and the place itself, which houses the project.” As a structure Enterprise Projects has been functioning independently and periodically since September 2015 in Ampelokipoi, Athens.

Etablissement d’en face (Brussels) aims to present artistic practices to an international audience by offering conditions of professional production to a wide spectrum of contemporary artists. Founded in 1991 by the artists Alec De Busschère, Delphine Bedel, Christophe Draeger and Patrick Everaert, it was originally located in the Rue d’Artois and moved to the Rue Antoine Dansaert in 2002. Over the years it has been programmed by various individuals. Currently Olivier Foulon, Steinar Haga Kristensen, Jean-Paul Jacquet, Zin Taylor, Margaux Schwarz, Harald Thys, Michael Van den Abeele, Margot Vanheusden, Peter Wächtler and Etienne Wynants operate Etablissement d’en face.

Olivier Goethals studied Architecture and Urban Development. He is working as architect and artist. In his wide practice he researches the connection between space and consciousness. Goethals made spatial interventions and artistic installations for venues, such as Het Nieuwe Instituut, Rotterdam; Z33, Hasselt; Extra City, Antwerp; Be-Part, Waregem; SMAK, Ghent; and Palais De Tokyo, Paris. Previously he worked as a freelance senior architect for De Vylder Vinck Taillieu (2008–16). Since 2010, he is teaching at the KULeuven Architecture Department. He was a guest critic at RU Ghent faculty of Architecture, LUCA School of Arts Experimental Studio and ETH Zurich faculty of Architecture. Goethals is in charge of the design and implementation of all spatial interventions for the art collective 019.

Thomas Helbig (DE, 1967) is an artist based in Berlin. The practice of Thomas Helbig contains painting, drawing and sculpture, while each of the media plays on its own field. The focus of the paintings is colour itself—in its intrinsic value, its materiality and the ability to create spatial illusions from countless shades of light and dark. In contrast, his collage sculptures demonstrate a different kind of transformation of the source materials he uses. His repertoire is based on a fundus of discarded, thrown-out things, as well as kitschy plastic sculptures. Helbig mixes and connects these disparate elements into new forms, which are displayed as coded messages from an enigmatic present. Helbig attended the Academy of Fine Arts, Munich and Goldsmiths, University of London, from 1989 to 1996, and is represented by Galerie Guido W. Baudach, Berlin.

Mathew Kneebone’s practice is founded on research into uncertainties surrounding technology, often combining different histories, myths, and folklore. His work touches upon various media including drawing, electronics, writing, sound, and performance to reconfigure or re-contextualize certain technologies, exploring an ambivalent blend of past and present. His work has recently been exhibited at Kunstverein, Amsterdam; 019, Ghent; Extra City, Antwerp; and Cloaca Projects, San Francisco. His writing has been published in Trigger Magazine, OASE Journal for Architecture, The Bulletins of The Serving Library, Another World, Umwelten, among others. He has given talks and workshops at Minnesota Street Project, San Francisco; V2_ Lab for Unstable Media, Rotterdam; Central Saint Martins, London; Sandberg Instituut, Amsterdam; San Serriffe, Amsterdam; Sitterwerk, St. Gallen; EKA Gallery, Tallinn; UEL, London. Kneebone teaches at California College of The Arts, San Francisco, where he is thesis writing supervisor.

Laurenz (Vienna): “The projects we (Aaron Amar Bhamra & Monika Georgieva), realize under Laurenz are often concerned with expanding the classical understanding of exhibition making and look for inspiration in different disciplines. Hosting and working with the existing conditions, often thematizing them and allowing them to take the main role rather than just being a context, is an important part of our collective practice and the way we communicate with artists and cultural practitioners. Through Laurenz, we aim to offer local and international contemporary artists and cultural practitioners a platform for expression and exploration. By focusing on a more discourse-based collective work, we seek to create new and nurture existing relationships within the cultural field.”

Marwan (Amsterdam) is an artist-run project space in the center of Amsterdam, initiated and programmed by Tirza Kater and Tim Mathijsen, who started this practice in their studio. Currently, Marwan is operating autonomously under the generous wings of AKINCI at Fokke Simonszstraat 12.

Annaïk Lou Pitteloud lives and works between Bern and Brussels. Her work makes use of different media to direct the viewer’s attention to the invisible components of image-construction, the museum space and the creative process itself. Pitteloud’s pared-down vocabulary raises critical questions to do with social issues, while challenging the art world’s mechanisms and its codes of perception, transmission and presentation. Her work has been presented amongst others in: Musée cantonal des Beaux-Arts Lausanne, CH; Kunstmuseum St. Gallen, CH; Museo cantonale d’Arte Lugano, CH; Kunsthalle Bern, CH; Kunstinstituut Melly (formerly known as Witte de With), NL; Riga Biennial, LV; Moscow Biennale, RU; Shanghai Biennale CN.

Playbill (Amsterdam) is an event series curated by Martha Jager and Isabelle Sully at Torpedo Theater, Amsterdam. Torpedo Theater is a long-running, small-scale, thirty-seat theatre in the heart of Amsterdam’s city centre. Originally founded by Het Parool, the Dutch national newspaper, the theatre has been committed to the spoken, written and performed word from the beginning. Drawing a connection to the theatre’s history with print media, Playbill is an event-based project invested in the presentation of experimental language and text-based artistic works on the (small) stage.

SB34 (Brussels) is a Brussels-based non-profit organization providing qualitative and affordable artistic production studios, workshops and equipment. They also manage two exhibition spaces in which local, international artists and art workers are invited to connect and collaborate to enhance the long term means of production, visibility and sustainability.

Significant Other (Vienna) “is/was mediating between art and architecture, former west and former east (currently centre), same as between laura and jen. it offers/ed a multifunctional projecting screen for inter-disciplinary, trans-geographic as well as critical inter-institutional dialog from its tiny and genuinely weird space on burggasse 24 (a space which josef daberning, our first exhibiting artist, pointedly described as ‘ugly as fuck’).”

Switch-Hook projects (Chicago) is a collaborative curatorial effort between Luca Klauba and Zola Rollins. Artists may become friends of switch hook through submission, curation, incident, accident and via phone call. Luca Klauba and Zola Rollins may act as curators, gallerists, exhibiting artists, friends, writers, and collectors.

Treignac Projet (Treignac): “We are an orbit of informal, temporary groups whose institutional materials are available through a matrix of sharing, hosting & careful commitment. Situated in the Limousin region of France, established in 2007 by Sam Basu and Liz Murray.”

Winona (Brussels): For one very intense year Charlie Usher and Henry Andersen ran a project-space on the ground floor in a small, beautifully tiled room in Brussels’ Quartier Maritime. The contract was only ever precarious and now the whole building is being turned into a chic apartment block and part of it is being demolished.