The Corner Show at Extra City

Artists: Accattone, Wim Catrysse, Céline Condorelli, Jan De Cock, Ferry André de la Porte, Willem de Rooij, Koenraad Dedobbeleer, Maatschappij Discordia, Lili Dujourie, Kersten Geers, Aglaia Konrad, Germaine Kruip, Gabriel Kuri, Valérie Mannaerts, Katja Mater, Josiah McElheny, Manfred Pernice, Bas Schevers, Santiago Sierra, Steve Van den Bosch, Koen van den Broek, Joep van Liefland and Philippe Van Snick

Exhibition title: The Corner Show

Curated by: Wouter Davidts in collaboration with Philip Metten and Mihnea Mircan

Venue: Extra City, Antwerp, Belgium

Date: September 12 – December 6, 2015

Photography: Jan Kempenaers and We Document Art, images copyright and courtesy of the artists and Extra City

Corners are everywhere: not only rooms have corners, but so do streets, objects, paintings, screens and pages. Corners are among the many modes of delineation that enclose space and demarcate routes, that increase or delimit areas of possibility. They epitomize the different ways in which structures and systems at once foster and limit our movements or actions in daily experience.

Questions about the space, function and figure of the corner appear in a variety of artistic and architectural practices. ‘Untitled (Corner Piece)’ (1964), by Robert Morris has become a key work in the art history of the past decades. As it occupied an exceptional space in the traditional gallery, it became a reference for the spatial strategies developed by artists after Minimalism, and for the manifold ‘corner pieces’ artists have produced ever since.

While ‘The Corner Show’ knowingly relates to this art historical canon, it adopts a deliberate contemporary vantage point. The exhibition outlines the conceptual and visual reasons for which certain works inhabit the edges of exhibition spaces, engaging the viewer in particular ways and deflecting attention from the ‘center of the stage’. But rather than a collection of corner pieces, the exhibition draws upon conversations with participating artists and assembles different contributions from each in a multi-perspectival puzzle, zooming in and out of different modes of spatial presence and spatial address. Bringing together a wide range of practitioners, stemming from different disciplines – from art, architecture, music to theatre – and working with different media – sculpture, painting, film, photography, performance as well as design – the exhibition aims to explore how the corner suggests itself as solution, station or metaphor in investigations that stem from different artistic premises, or advance different conceptual propositions.

Within a sculptural scenography conceived by artist Philip Metten, ‘The Corner Show’ brings together existing, adapted and commissioned works that either occupy, scrutinize or challenge the most commonplace, overlooked and intricate architectural feature of both exhibition space and daily environment.