OV36
“Form Follows Function”
Marcel Breuer >< Anneke Eussen

Spring is here and Q-O2 will offer you two post-residency presentation using the appropriate instruments for the season: various sounds, types, forms, and lengths of pipe-likes and flutes. Both our current residents are experimenting with this type of instrumentarium. So be sure to come and listen to Sholto Dobie on the 26th of March, and Hannah Todt on the 2nd of April. Further news is the complete program of the Oscillation Festival (ticket-sale is open!), and the print of a second edition of umland’s publication  Éliane Radigue – Intermediary Spaces / Espaces intermédiaires, which is again available at our space and via Les Presses du Réel.

Sholto Dobie will present a short listening session of work-in-progress and a performance with self-constructed instruments. Sholto Dobie creates instruments with analogue technologies which draw on the functions and designs of folk and traditional wind instruments, such as bagpipes and organs. Their appearance several thousand years ago represent a technological shift in music, as humans extended the reach of their lungs, by creating bellows, bags and reservoirs that could sustain flutes and reeds more easily and for longer than human lungs. It is a drive that is echoed in more recent technological socio-musical shifts, such as electronic dance music. Dobie incorporates analogue electronics alongside handmade reed pipes, using basic prefabricated timer modules and industrial electric valves, to control air flow.
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I wonder why the flute has holes is an ongoing project that explores the materiality of steel tubes and their sonic qualities by reinterpreting them as a polyphonic flute that is to be played by several people. The relationship between form, function and efficiency as well as the creation of associations are central questions in this process. The post-residency presentation will introduce the work through audio samples and a short live performance.
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The 2024 festival Oscillation ::: Materia Forma is a reflection on form, format and performance. Six days of sound celebrations, featuring concerts, (in-situ) performances, talks, round table conversations, a walk, and a series of workshops, hosted by VK Vaartkapoen in Molenbeek, and complemented with outings to B.A. in Anderlecht and the Saint-Jean-Baptiste de Molenbeek church. The complete line-up and breakdown per day is now confirmed, and festival tickets are available here.

Featuring:
Ahnjili ZhuParris, Laura Mello, Michiko Ogawa & Lucy Railton, Evicshen, Bojana Cvejić, Gabriel Paiuk, Tim Ingold, Rim Irscheid, Leonie Persyn, Natasha Pirard, Lee Patterson & Pak Yan Lau, Ailbhe Nic Oireachtaigh, Nina Garcia/Mariachi, Liew Niyomkarn,, Enrico Malatesta, Margarida Garcia, Okkyung Lee, Jacqueline Nova, Ana María Romano G., Giulia Rae, Floris Vanhoof, Shamica Ruddock & Hannan Jones, Franziska Windisch, Valentina Vuksic, Ji Youn Kang, Sandar Tun Tun, Jana Rush, Emilie Škrijelj & Tom Malmendier, Nika Son, Tetsuya Umeda , Jonáš Gruska

Each year, STUK & Q-O2 present a showcase of new sound art in Belgium. Four promising sound artists were selected and put in the spotlights: Anouk Kellner, Pavel Tchikov, Lawrence McGuire & Kaat Vanhaverbeke. They get residency space, artistic feedback and present their work in a parcours during the Showcase Emerging Sound 2024. Register here for free.
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Éliane Radigue (born 1932 in Paris) is considered one of the most innovative and influential contemporary composers. From her early electronic music through to her acoustic work of the last fifteen years, she unfolds an intensity which is at once subtle and monumental. Through her deep reflections on sound and listening, not only her music but also her working methods have come to shape a widely resonating set of new parameters for working with sound as musical material.This second extended edition of the book on composer Éliane Radigue adds a new chapter to the otherwise unchanged conversations which made the body of the first edition, published in 2019. The book is available at the Q-O2 workspace and via Les Presses du Réel. More information on the umland website.
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Sonntag 24.03.2024, 15 Uhr
VERNISSAGE: Yann Freichels
DANS L’EMPIRE DE L’EMPEREUR TOMATO KETCHUP

Yann Freichels ist einer der vielversprechendsten jungen Talente aus Ostbelgien, der mit dem Blick eines Malers auf die Gegenwart schaut und sich dabei der Malweisen seiner Vorgänger:innen bedient. Ironisch und mit viel Sprachwitz seziert er die deutsche Malereigeschichte des frühen 20. Jahrhunderts. Seine Vorbilder sind die Maler der Neuen Sachlichkeit, wie z.B. George Grosz oder Otto Dix. Anders als viele deutsche Maler:innen kann er sich diesen Künstlern jedoch ohne Ehrfurcht und Pathos nähern. Der Vorteil deutschsprachig aber eben nicht Deutsch zu sein wird bei ihm so deutlich, wie bei keinem anderen Maler seiner Generation. Mehr Informationen hier.

Neuer IKOB-Podcast: apropos #11
Garten sprengen mit Veronika Eberhart

KINDER ÜBERNEHMEN DAS IKOB
Junge Kunstfans gesucht – nur wenige Plätze frei!

OV36
 “Form Follows Function”:
Marcel Breuer >< Anneke Eussen

OV Project is delighted to present Form Follows Function, its 36th project–a presentation of works by Anneke Eussen (b. 1978, Netherlands), and the titan of Modernist design, Hungarian-German architect Marcel Breuer (1902-1981).

The dialog presented in the exhibition unfolds firstly through the material considerations of each practitioner–communicating confrontations of forms, shapes, curves, and abutments of industrial yet sensuous connections. Subsequently evolving to address the temporal aspects evident in the juxtaposition, along vectors of sight, touch, posture and approach. The dialogics of lightness and strength frame the presentation. The artists’ respective deployments strategically facilitate a deterioration of the rationality that is part and parcel to industrial production–the subject of their meditations.

Grounded in early Modernist fascination with speed and progress, Marcel Breuer’s designs employ then-state-of-the-art techniques, resulting in modular, machine-like constructions entry into the domestic setting. His early works, designed and executed at the Bauhaus, typify the layering of industrial functionality atop of domestic usage–echoing fellow architect Frank Lloyd Wright’s 1908 quotation: “Form and function should be one, joined in spiritual union.”

Anneke Eussen’s sculptural constructions, converge on the wall with a sideways glance towards the Dadaist collage traditions. Working entirely with found materials, she searches for artifacts, here they are fragments of commercially produced glass. Discarded as having reached the terminus of their usefulness, they are resurrected as poetic objects of transcendence. The artist describes her practice as a cultivation of the found materials; an exploration of their narrative potential. She stops short of manipulating the silhouette of any given fragment in favor of subtler processes. Instead she relies on methods of arrangement, layering the pieces to formulate the pictureplane.

Breuer, while helming the woodshop at the Bauhaus, categorically disregarded the organic material. Inspired by his own bicycle, he famously ordered bent piping directly from the manufacturer to produce the ‘Wassily Chair’ (after Breuer’s instructor, Wassily Kandinsky), which resided in the lecturer’s lounge at the school. As if folding his disregard back on itself the chair went into production at Thonet–a company known to this day for popularizing bentwood furniture in the late 19th century. This momentum is echoed in the stance of his other chairs–the 301, 331 &c.–and the kinetic spring of the 1090 and 1093.

As much as Marcel Breuer’s bicycle propels us towards inevitably, the shattered contours of Eussen’s compositions glance retrospectively at traces, engaging with amorphous narratives—memories that cling like dust to a mirror. The works are deep reservoirs of energy expended, corroborating elusive histories: of light cutting through them, a multitude of contacts, from both humans and machines, a lens through which we view the world, together with a reflection of ourselves.

In each practice, objects dictate experience. They shape and link it to the wider world of functional design, through twists and turns towards the poetic, the personal, the transcendent. Harnessing energy, rendering coldness as warmth–the warmth of a body on a chair, the perspectival gaze into the abyss of the layers of history.

Marcel Breuer (b. 1902, Austria-Hungary, d. 1981, New York City) was a pioneering architect and designer of Modernism, particularly Brutalism and the International Style. In 1991, the New York Times regarded his chairs as some of the most important works of their kind produced in the 20th century. He was one of the earliest students of the Staatliches Bauhaus in Weimar Germany, where he was in charge of the carpentry workshop, and studied under painter Wassily Kandinsky (for whom his most famous chair is named). Breuer emigrated to the United States in 1937 (naturalized in 1944), becoming a faculty at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design, at the invitation of Bauhaus founder Walter Gropius. In the US he designed, among others, the IBM Research and Development Facility; the Whitney Museum of American Art (at 945 Madison Av.); the US Department of Housing and Urban Development; and St. John’s Abbey.

His archives are stewarded by the Syracuse University library, Syracuse, New York, and the Smithsonian Archives of American Art, Washington D.C, and New York City.

Anneke Eussen (b. 1978, Netherlands) is a contemporary artist living and working in Vaals, Netherlands. She graduated from the Academy of Maastricht, Netherlands, and completed a post-graduate residency at the Higher Institute of Fine Arts, Brussels. Her work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at Kunstverein Schwerin, Schwerin, DE; the Suermondt Ludwig Museum, Aachen, DE; Lauren Marinaro, New York, NY; Document, Chicago, IL; and Tatjana Pieters, Ghent, BE.