Modern & Contemporary Art Exhibitions in Brussel

Charlotte Vander Borght presents a new series of resin sculptures and photographs in dialogue with works from the 1990s by renowned Polish-Belgian artist Tapta, in close collaboration with Maurice Verbaet who manages the estate of Tapta. Bringing the industrial and organic into conversation, both artists explore material and formal transformation. SYBIL is pleased to present, in collaboration with Maurice Verbaet, a duo presentation of works by Tapta (1926 - 1997) and Charlotte vander Borght (b.1988). The Unknown offers an opportunity to shed new light on the late works of Tapta, a major yet internationally underexposed artist, while opening a dialogue with vander Borght’s contemporary practice through material and thematic affinities.

Lost and Found takes its title from the memory project organised by Japanese photographer Takahashi Munemasa in the wake of the earthquake and tsunami that hit the Pacific coast of Japan in March 2011. The project works with a vast accumulation of family photographs discovered in the ruins of the city of Yamamoto in the Miyagi prefecture. Damaged, marked or partly obliterated by the effects of water and mud, these snapshots spoke of a vanished world. An installation forming part of this project, a wall of ghosts, opens this exhibition devoted to the ambivalent power of images—images of a world already vanished or yet coming into being, images of a Japan in the grip of omnipresent catastrophe and seized at the same time by an explosive vitality endlessly renewed. The exhibition draws on the collection of the A Foundation to present a selection of works for the most part by women photographers, too often omitted from canonical accounts of Japanese photography. Among the photographers represented, figures such as Ishiguro Kenji, Miyako Ishiuchi or Tsuchida Hiromi have concerned themselves with the still tangible effects of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima, while others, like Miyamoto Ryūji, Shiga Lieko and Takahashi Munemasa, have focused on such expressions of telluric forces as the Kobe earthquake of 1995 or the tsunami of March 2011. For counterpoint, the exhibition also includes a selection of photographic series from the 1970s and '80s, rarely shown or only recently rediscovered. There we find the flashy colour of takenoko-zoku dancers, the weekend heroes photographed by Shibuya Noriko; the dense crowds of Aomori’s Nebuta festival, photographed by Sugimoto Tatsuki; the televisual experiment of Mochizuki Masao and Yoshida Mutsuko; and the formal innovation of photographers like Araki Nobuyoshi, Nihongi Satomi, Takanashi Yutaka and Yamazawa Eiko. An exhibition ambivalently suspended, “ half awake, half asleep in the water ” in the words that Asako Narahashi chose as title for one of the series shown here, in which the artist, half submerged, reveals to us the instability of the world.