The World on Its Head: Contemporary Art from Belgium

The World on Its Head: Contemporary Art from Belgium
October 12 – November 25, 2000
San Francisco Art Institute

This exhibitions included nine established and emerging artists from Belguim who shared an affinity for both the perceptual and the conceptual. Some of their work also reflects the complex intermingling of disparate cultural, linguistic and geo-political factions and chaotic conditions that characterize Belgium today which is why I called the exhibition The World on Its Head, a Flemish proverb referenced by an upside down globe in Pieter Breughel the Elder’s famous painting Flemish Proverbs (1618).

After several curatorial visits to Antwerp, Brussels and Ghent I selected work for the exhibition by both well-established, internationally known artists and those who were well-recognized in Europe, but had not exhibited much in the US. The exhibition included sculpture and video by Christine Clinckx, photographs by Carl DeKeyzer; the Tattooed Pig project by Wim Delvoye (in which two pigs lived on campus for a part of the exhibition); a complex plastic tubular installation by Honore d’O; a monumental bronze sculpture by Jan Fabre (Man Measuring the Sky, perched on the highest part of the SFAI roof) and digital prints by Ann Anne-Mie Van Kerkhoven. Additionally there were several site specific works: neon text sculptures by Marc Luyten, an installation inside the SFAI café by Angel Vergara and Anne Veronica Janssens perceptual mirror work installed on exterior walls and benches covered with heat-sensitive materials that created iridescent body prints.

The 70-page full-color exhibition publication included my own preface to the project, with an introduction by Jan Hoet, then director of the SMAK Museum in Ghent and a guest essay by Johan Pas, a curator based in Antwerp.

Click here for a pdf of the preface and introduction to the book.