—Sarah Bal—

Collaboration with Toon Leen

Collaboration with Toon Leen

Exhibition at Fred & Ferry Gallery in Antwerp, from 6 February until 12 March 2022.

The exhibition —Sarah Bal— featured fourteen paintings and two video lectures that were linked by three elements: the fictional persona of Sarah Bal, an artist fascinated by colour, played by me; excerpts from music by C.P.E. Bach and Franz Liszt, played by pianist Lucas Blondeel; and the figure of the dash, here used to build bridges between politics and art, the serious and the playful, reality and fiction. The painter Sarah Bal gave guided tours for the exhibition's finissage.

Toon Leen is a visual artist who mixes painting, video and performance readings. He creates characters such as Ludovic Vermeersch or Sarah Bal, who plays the role of the painter, whose paintings he has actually created himself. In a way, he finds himself simply commenting on an exhibition or a creation that he has staged himself. By playing Sarah Bal, I myself became one of his creations, unless I became a painter by waking up one morning...

The obsession of the dash, as the major theme of the exhibition, creates bridges, sometimes real, sometimes fictitious, between art history, politics and history. The dash, as the creator of stolen, interrupted time, becomes the symbol - even the source, in Sarah Bal's mind - of political coups d'état. She travels between Trump's United States, the Myanmar coup and Gorbachov's Soviet Union. But the dash is also the line. The Mondrian or Progenese line. Or perhaps it's simply Bach's interruption without continuation-

More informations and images can be found >>> here and >>> here.

Watch some minutes of Homage to the dash >>> here.