Described as "a contemporary city conversation" and "a unique art experience in the city of Ghent",
TRACK enjoys the participation of around
40 artists that present (more or less) site specific works in/around the Belgium city, organised in several 'clusters' (Tondelier, Tolhuis, Macharius, Centrum, Blandijn and Citadel).
TRACK was initiated by the
S.M.A.K. (it is
curated by its artistic director,
Philippe Van Cauteren and
Mirjam Varadinis, curator at Kunsthaus Zürich) with the aim of continuing the tradition of two exhibition projects also organised by
S.M.A.K.: the seminal
Chambres d’Amis (curated by Jan Hoet in 1986), a show that
exhibited art private houses around Ghent, and
Over the Edges (2000, curated by Jan Hoet and Giacinto Di Pietrantonio), which took the
idea of the corner as a starting point, or as the curators put it "the boundary between interior and exterior, between indoors and outdoors, between private and public".
Pilvi Takala's posters and a sound work on the notion of ‘lost pigeons’.
Lara Almarcegui's 700m3 "Concrete Mountain" in the Tondelier cluster.
The artist speaks about her work in this
video.
Pascale Marthine-Tayou, "Le défi" (2012)
.[from the
website]
"On 16 August 2009 the Jamaican Usain Bolt took the world record for the 10-metre sprint to an unreal 9.58 seconds. In 2012 Pascale Marthine Tayou has laid out a single-lane athletics track in the heart of the Tondelier district. Until the 1960s, this part of Ghent had been full of working industries. Although most of the factories have since been demolished or put to new use, one can even now still read the history of this neighbourhood in its eroded urban skin. Pascale Marthine Tayou’s "Le défi" is a red gravel track that comes to a dead end at a wall. It is clear how the work is to be read and used, but the consequences are ambiguous. Le défi
will not be recognised as an artwork by most of the local residents. It is a playful but meditative reflection on the significance of sport, the acceptance of a challenge and the generation of social change and emancipation. In this way, Pascale Marthine Tayou has created ‘an image’ of both the global, Olympic heroism of a world record and the minor hitches facing every individual."
Teresa Margolles'
Mesa y dos bancos (Table and Two Benches), 2012 in the Tondelier cluster.
"For TRACK [Margolles] had a public picnic bench cast in cement. She mixes this neutral substance with the water extracted from cloths that had been used to clean up the blood of victims of the Mexican drug war from the streets."
Mekhitar Garabedian's work against the Butcher’s Hall façade.
[from the website]
"‘Search and Destroy’ is not only the title of a hit by the 70s nihilistic American punk band The Stooges, but also a military strategy first employed in the Vietnam War. To Garabedian, this phrase refers to the way the history of a place is handled and the way a fracture in the past continues to torment the present."S.M.A.K. museum façade, turned into
TRACK.
The ‘Museum Graveyard’ project at Citadel Park by
Leo Copers.
Due to safety reasons
Danh Vo's work ‘WE THE PEOPLE’ was moved to the nearby Museum of Fine Arts, opposite
S.M.A.K.Sven Augustijnen, 'Spectres' in Citadel Park.
"The starting point for [his multi-part work] ‘Spectres’ is the murder of Patrice Lumumba a few months after his election victory in the Congo in 1960. For TRACK, Augustijnen sought in vain for the tree against which Lumumba was shot. It had probably been chopped down to make charcoal. In the Citadel Park, Augustijnen sets up an installation in which this charcoal – an indispensable source of income but also a symbolic remnant of the tree – is transported by bicycle, a ‘typically’ Congolese means of conveyance. Augustijnen deliberately located this installation near the ‘Moorken’. This small black sculpture on top of artificial rocks in the Citadel Park dates from 1888 and is a reminder of the time when the Congo was still Leopold II’s private pleasure garden. The ‘Moorken’ portrays the Congolese boy Sakala, whom the pioneer Lieven Van de Velde brought back to Belgium in 1884."
Entrance to
Galerie Tatjana Pieters at Nieuwevaart 124, Ghent
'
Esta puerta pide clavo' (2 June–19 August 2012), is a group show curated by
Rivet (Manuela Moscoso & Sarah Demeuse) with the participation of: Philippe van Snick, Lorea Alfaro, Rey Akdogan, June Crespo, Rubén Grilo, David Jablonowski, Lisa Oppenheim, Kiko Pérez, Asaha Schechter, Daniel Steegman-Magrané and Batia Suter.
[From the
press release]
"Based on an idiom that literally translates as 'This door asks for a nail,'
Esta puerta pide clavo not only highlights an economy of means that informed the making of the selected works but also emphasizes the equipment-like agency of matter over and above hermeneutics. One strand of "Esta puerta pide clavo" veers towards
abstraction, possibly echoing a common language of
design as well as artistic actions from the 20th-century."
Entrance to the show.
(...) "
David Jablonowski's sculptures [photo above and below]
awkwardly materialize and juxtapose processes of scanning with generic computer visualization, digitized archival imagery as well as what look like casts spat out by 3-D printers."
(...)
"Rey Akdogan's gathering of packed and piled light filters remind of the mass-produced products that are supposedly applicable anywhere and that continue to shape our mode of perception.""Batia Suter's enlarged and superposed scans of found printed matter turn the offset image into a sculptural object, and equally obstruct indexical readings of the photographic material."[Floor]
"Asha Schechter's sculptures (belated puns to Duchamp) take stock imagery or common designs into a formal non-communicative context that prioritizes relations between infinite background and foreground." (Background, hanging)
Lorea Alfaro and (right, wall)
Kiko Pérez.
(left and opposite wall)
June Crespo and (right, wall)
Lisa Oppenheim."Equally focused on intermediary material components and backgrounds in the process of photography, Lisa Oppenheim's unique photograms resemble digitally designed patterns while being the repositories of a darkroom interpretation of Victorian flower arrangements."
"The other strand insists on specificity of materials and imagery. June Crespo's precise scans provide the source material for layered sculptures that force the object-image into three-dimensionality and volume."