traces, a tentative and collective research exhibition @ BLANCO, Nucleo, Coupure Rechts, Ghent, 23.09-06.10.2024

Planned in dialogue with Jasper Delbecke (post-doctoral researcher at LUCA School of Arts) throughout 2024, the group research exhibition traces took place at the end of September till the beginning of October in the big exhibition room called BLANCO, part of artist's organization Nucleo, which I was a member of at that time as a user and renter of studio space mainly. The focus of traces was to let the many different contributions sip in over the exhibition time as to make interactions, reactions, changes, additions, retractions and so on possible: the exhibition time and space would then function as an artistic and plastic research space, allowing for unfinished works, works in progress, in situ interventions, new propositions coming from artists involved in different media and so on. Due to concrete and practical limits, most artists contributed with recent works (as would be the case with expo's in general) while others clearly made use of the space to come at several moments, adding works then retracting them, making changes or additions to made contributions, involving with me as an ad hoc and in situ kind of emergency curator to help redispose works throughout the exhibition time - the exhibition space gradually filling with sometimes slightly conflicting works etc.

I am especially thankfull for the many interactions with Jasper Delbecke as some kind of constant 'third eye', to state it in contemporary theatre terms, but also the ever strongly involved Jelle Martens and Veva Leye, the different conversations at several moments with photo artist Frank Bassleer or the repeated interventions of Colette Broeckaert, the long talk I had with Ans Nys on research in the arts and the final group chat we held on the same matter after a lecture by Tom Lambeens, to name only a few. With most invited and also with not invited but ever welcome artists I had fruitful dialogues on and through the development of the research exhibition, and so did Jasper, and so did we mutually. Interactions with planned or more spontaneous visitors, informed by the arts or not at all, were also very telling. The process ended being quite intensive for me since I was there every day for more than two weeks, almost every day on a row. But this specific kind of intensity and energy proved very enlightening and thoroughly informed on possible future projects, as traces also drew back, I realized then, on some ways of collective making I experienced at the time of Imprimitiv.

In the case of traces, the gradual, tentative and collective proved slightly more oriented since the question of the trace at least minimally (for others quite strongly) channelled contributions. The hardest aspect, for me, seemed to conceive of this all of something as 'research' in the end: a lot was created, presented, discussed, but how could we possibly wrap this up as 'research' without falling into easy pitfalls as 'embodied knowledge' and taking into account that art or creation never simply adds up to knowledge or cognition in a strict sense - and these are rarely art's aims? Luckily, Jasper Delbecke took care of writing a very lucid and conclusive article on how to analyze and even assess what happened within these weeks called traces...

traces here and traces there.

Jasper Delebecke's stimulating article on traces.

Some pictures taken by Jelle Martens:

Academic research & education