NICOLAS BOURTHOUMIEUX (FR, 1985)

Originally from Toulouse, Nicolas Bourthoumieux has lived and worked in Brussels since his studies at La Cambre. A multidisciplinary artist whose work includes sculptures, installations, paintings, videos and photographs.

In his practice, Nicolas Bourthoumieux subtly materializes his astonishment of the world, nourished by essential serendipity. His poetic gestures occupy the space, refusing a negotiation with the architecture. His ensemble of works commonly reveals the strange, invisible transformation time may confer on things. Often recycling his own artworks, he sees objects as carrying a temporal charge from which ghosts may (re)appear.

GUILLAUME BIJL (BE, 1946)

Guillaume Bijl is known for his large-scale installations and visual realism. Since the late 70s, Bijl created realistic decors using found objects. In doing this, he had a pioneering role in the resurgence of the ready-made.

Bijl shows the audience various aspects of our western ‘civilisation’ and consumer society. Using extreme stereotypes, he creates a sort of ‘archeology of our time’ in a tragi-comedic, alienating way.

His participation will be a great opportunity to reflect on his practice in light of a Surrealist strand that continues to reverberate into today’s art practices.

OLGA MIHK FEDOROVA (BE/RU, 1980)

Olga works at the intersection of photography, painting, digital imaging and installations. Using three-dimensional software Fedorova creates forms that resemble ready-made models and inserts them into spaces and landscapes typified by their aseptic, clinical sterility and detached, impersonal ambience. The images of Fedorova, with their surreal, dystopian presentation, evoke uneasy, dreamlike states that feel both familiar and alien, comforting and disturbing.

Quarantine Diary project is the first visual art project created by Fedorova, where she merged real and surreal to reflect 2020 pandemic time.

2020 Joachim Coucke & Olga Fedorova: Road To Know Where, Gent Belgium 2019 Clusterfuck, Future Gallery Berlin Germany 2018 Artificial Paradise? Immersion in Space and Time, Graz Austria 2018 Olga Fedorova: She lives in you, Gallerie Charlot, Paris 2018 Future Love. Desire and Kinship in Hypernature, Basel Switzerland

2017 Olga Fedorova: Generic Jungle, Annka Kultys , London UK

RIA PACQUÉE (BE, 1954)

Ria had her international breakthrough in the 1980s with her performance series featuring characters she created – ‘Madame’ and ‘It’. Infiltrating reality by means of these two personae, she carried out an artistic investigation of the thin dividing line between the fictional and the actual.

In more recent work she has tended to concentrate on photographic and video productions, in which the experiences gained as a performance artist still play an important role.

LUC DELEU (BE, 1944)

After they settled in house “Les Nénuphars”, in the prestigious Cogels Osylei in Antwerp, Belgium in May 1968, Luc Deleu and his wife Laurette Gillemot founded T.O.P. office, a studio for urbanism and architecture in 1970.

The starting point, motivation and goal of the studio was questioning architecture and urban design, their position and duty in a global society. This generated the necessity to think about why and how to run an architect studio and how to direct it towards a truly independent and autonomous development with the use of a large set of media.

So, T.O.P. office was set up with the very conviction that it would be better to reduce the spatial impact of building and to build less. Convinced that future developments in communication media would enable a reborn nomadic life, the first ideas were to come with work that emphasizes mobility versus the immobilism of real estate and to contradict the exclusive privilege of the building as living and job accommodation.

On many occasions - apart from being an independent research team developing an autonomous format for urban research by design – T.O.P office participated in the debate on urban planning and architecture, and therefore maybe ended up in a certain niche.

NIENKE BAECKELANDT (BE, 1989)

The work of Nienke Baeckelandt derives from a persistent urge to experiment with different materials and media. Hereby she always seeks out the tension between intuition and control.

Her images are often the result of “concentrations or intensities” of a certain moment. In her most recent work, she explores the boundaries of what the viewer notices or, on the contrary, what (s)he passes by. Seeing, appearing, disappearing.

YI ZHANG (BE/ROC, 1996) 

Yi Zhang is born in Wuhan and studied painting in Guangzhou.

In 2016, an Erasmus exchange brought her to Antwerp for six months. In 2019 she returned to Belgium to continue her practice in visual art.

In 2019 she returned to Belgium for a master's degree in visual arts. That same year she won the Stockman's Art Book Prize and showed drawings in Inbox, M HKA.

Today she lives in Amsterdam,where she was offered a six-month residency. In China, Zhang worked with different media: video, photography, drawing, sculptural installations and oil paintings on canvas. In one canvas we recognize the shape of a saucer and glued volumes that were given an extra shadow by means of paint. Her current works are about love and sharing love.

ANGEL PAZ (VE, 1978)

Originally from Venezuela, he first learned to play his first guitar chords at the age of 9 with one of his older brothers. As a teenager, through meetings with the artisans of Margarita Island, he took his first steps in jewelry making. As an adult, he began a long journey to Venezuela that took him all over South America in search of learning. These travels showed him the musical diversity emanating from different cultures: it was at this time that he discovered the Zampoña, a traditional wind instrument from the Andes.

At the age of 27 he decided to go to Europe; life goes on. He continues his journey with the guitar and the Zampoña, trying to preserve the Andean culture that he has been imbued with.

MAYA VAN LEEMPUT

Maya Van Leemput is Senior Researcher and UNESCO Chair in Images of the Future and co-creator of the Open Time|Applied Futures Research group at Erasmus Brussels University of Applied Sciences and Arts, where she also teaches strategic futures orientation to final year Idea and Innovation Management students.

In 2001, Maya received a PhD from the University of Westminster for research on visions of the future in television, with a content analysis and production study of British television in the mid-1990s. In partnership with photographer Bram Goots, she is conducting a long-term independent project to explore images of the future, combining conversational approaches and visual ethnography. Her critical and prospective interdisciplinary work on media, culture, arts, (intercultural) communication, development, science and technology in society uses experimental and participatory approaches.

Van Leemput is a member of the World Futures Studies Federation and the Centre of Postnormal Policy and Futures Studies, a board member of the Association of Professional Futurists and a founding member of the interdisciplinary visual arts collective OST and Plurality University. 

AGENCE FUTUR

Agence Future (AF) is a long-term collaboration between photographer Bram Goots and futures researcher Maya Van Leemput. With a unique blend of conversation and image-based approaches they collect, study, co-create, try-out and share images of the futures. This practice started over 20 years ago with a 30-month field journey in 28 countries on five continents and hundreds of interviews. Agence Future’s films, print publications and installations highlight the diversity of images of the futures and the value of inclusive exchanges of various scale and scope (polylogues) about how we design, develop and transform all our futures as well as what those futures might become.

BRAM GOOTS

Bram Goots trained as a multimedia artist at Middlesex University and works as a photographer in a wide variety of contexts: press photography, reportage for socio-cultural or philanthropic organizations, film set photography and still photography, ... His work is linked to that of artists, arts organizations and museums, musicians, theater and film directors. He was the resident photographer of the M_HKA (Museum of Contemporary Art Antwerp) for over 10 years.

Bram developed his work as a cameraman/cinematographer on several documentary projects, music videos, TV series, infomercials and commercials. In 2019, he landed his first job as a B-unit cameraman on the Belgian feature film Yummy and two years later, in the midst of a pandemic, he took on the same role in Iraq for Baghdad Messi.

Since 1998, Bram has been providing footage for the independent experimental project Agence Future and handling logistics during field research. Together with Maya Van Leemput, he develops interpretations and artistic representations as well as exhibitions of the collection of images of the future co-created with futurists, artists, experts and non-experts.

Bram is a founding member of the international art collective OST (Oiseaux Sans Têtes) and was one of the first members of the photographic cooperative Picturetank in Paris.

CARLOS AIRES (ES, 1974) 

He obtained a bachelor’s in fine arts at the University of Granada in Spain. Upon graduating in 1997, he moved to the Netherlands and completed his postgraduate studies at Fontys Academy (Tilburg, Netherlands), HISK (Antwerp, Belgium) and Ohio State University (Ohio, USA).

He has participated in numerous exhibitions in national and international institutions, such as: CAC (Malaga, Spain), MACBA (Barcelona, Spain), Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art (USA), Imperial Belvedere Palace (Vienna, Austria), ARTIUM (Vitoria, Spain), Maison Particulière Art Center (Brussels, Belgium), MUSAC (Leon, Spain), BB6 Bucharest International Biennale for Contemporary Art (Bucharest, Romania), B.P.S. 22 (Charleroi, Belgium), 5th Thessaloniki Biennale of Contemporary Art (Thessaloniki , Greece).