May 2022

Géraldine TOBÉ was born on February 9, 1992 in Kinshasa, in the Democratic Republic of Congo. As a child, she is considered a child-witch by the evangelical pastors of the country, who try by violence to exorcise her. This traumatic experience, common practice in Congo, made of fire and smoke, will follow Géraldine TOBÉ until her life as a woman. 

Xu Bing is a Chinese artist who served as vice-president of the Central Academy of Fine Arts. He is known for his printmaking skills and installation art, as well as his creative artistic use of language, words, and text and how they have affected our understanding of the world. He is an A.D. White Professor-at-Large at Cornell University. He was awarded the MacArthur Fellows Program in 1999 and the Fukuoka Prize in 2003. 

Francis Alÿs consistently directs his distinct poetic and imaginative sensibility toward anthropological and geopolitical concerns centered around observations of, and engagements with everyday life, which the artist himself has described as “a sort of discursive argument composed of episodes, metaphors, or parables.” His multifaceted projects including public actions, installations, video, paintings, and drawings have involved traveling the longest possible route between locations in Mexico and the United States; pushing a melting block of ice through city streets; commissioning sign painters to copy his paintings; filming his efforts to enter the center of a tornado; carrying a leaking can of paint along the contested Israel/Palestine border; and equipping hundreds of volunteers to move a colossal sand dune ten centimeters. 

Frank Theys is Belgian filmmaker and visual artist. Theys' video and interactive installations to experimental film, documentary, and theater performance have been placed into collections at the MOMA in New York, the Centre National de la Cinématographie in Paris, SMAK Ghent, and the Museum for the Moving Image in New York. 

Alys Tomlinson (born 1975) is a British photographer. She has published the books Following Broadway (2013), Ex-Voto (2019) and Lost Summer (2020). For Ex-Voto she won the Photographer of the Year award at the 2018 Sony World Photography Awards. Portraits from Lost Summer won First prize in the 2020 Taylor Wessing Photographic Portrait Prize.  

Thierry De Cordier is a contemporary visual artist. His art consists of drawings, paintings, sculptures, installations and poetry/philosophy, and his work is held in numerous museum collections, including S.M.A.K. His works may be seen in the Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst, the Centre Georges Pompidou and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden. 

Kris Verdonck studied visual arts, architecture and theatre and this training is evident in his work. His creations are positioned in the transit zone between visual arts and theatre, between installation and performance, between dance and architecture. As a theatre maker and visual artist, he can look back over a wide variety of projects.  

Joëlle Tuerlinckx is a Belgian artist who combines found objects, drawings, collages, film, video, and slide projections in her installations. Her work has been displayed in solo exhibitions at the Wiels art centre in Brussels, at the Haus der Kunst in Munich, at the Kunstmuseum Basel in Switzerland and at the Drawing Center in New York City. She also participated in documenta X in Kassel. A retrospective of her work was presented in Brussels, Munich and at the Arnofini in Bristol. She was also chosen to participate in Skulptur Projekte Munister in 2017.  

Marcel Broodthaers worked primarily as a poet until the age of 40, when he turned to the visual arts. Over the next 12 years, his work retained a poetic quality and a sense of humor that balanced its conceptual framework; for his first solo exhibition, he encased unsold copies of his latest poetry book, Pense-Bête (Memory aid, 1964), in plaster, turning them into a sculpture. Broodthaers continued to invent ways to give material form to language while working across mediums—poetry, sculpture, painting, artist’s books, printmaking, and film. From 1968 to 1972, he operated the Musée d’Art Moderne, Département des Aigles (Museum of Modern Art, Department of Eagles), a traveling museum dedicated not to his work as an artist but to the role of the institution itself and the function of art in society. In the final years of his life, Broodthaers created immersive “décors,” large-scale displays in which examples of his past work were often unified with objects borrowed for the occasion.

Marcel Duchamp was a French-American painter, sculptor, chess player, and writer whose work is associated with Cubism, Dada, and conceptual art. Duchamp is commonly regarded, along with Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse, as one of the three artists who helped to define the revolutionary developments in the plastic arts in the opening decades of the 20th century, responsible for significant developments in painting and sculpture. Duchamp has had an immense impact on twentieth century and twenty first-century art, and he had a seminal influence on the development of conceptual art. By the time of World War I he had rejected the work of many of his fellow artists (such as Henri Matisse) as “retinal” art, intended only to please the eye. Instead, Duchamp wanted to use art to serve the mind.