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Aline Bouvy at Motel

July 12, 2016

Artist: Aline Bouvy

Exhibition title: Who will wear my teeth as amulets?

Curated by: Bunk Club

Venue: Motel, New York, US

Date: June 25 – July 24, 2016

Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and Motel, New York

There is myself and then there is what I do – between them a great jumble of soft tissue. For the last weeks it was almost with hate that I sat at my work table. I worked slowly, made frequent excuses. Inaction is stability too. The old paradox that the donkey – equally thirsty as it is deprived of food – when placed between a bale of hay and a bucket of water will postpone its choice until it eventually dies. This apparently absurd thought-experiment becomes useful only when we strip away the metaphor – back to the real suffering of the imaginary donkey. Then, and only then, after seeing the animal’s indecision in the flesh, can we re-inscribe it into the realm of metaphor.

But I am tired (too tired for that). Each day begins early and ends late. And when I finally sleep, I dream about islands without shores and rivers without mouths. Everything is perfectly sealed, without orifice or entry.

I imagine how death in America tastes different than it does in Europe. Freud was a button-down misogynist who saw death and sex everywhere (even seeing sex in death and vice versa). And always clothed as wolves, and wasps, and walnut trees, and endless, endless metaphors of castration. I fantasize that death in America is younger, more virile. We can discount the cliché of the hooded skeleton carrying a sickle as a pure lack of imagination. This kind of metaphor (death is a person) speaks to a lazy anthropocentrism that can only imagine the world composed of intentions analogous to our own. At any rate, it is too banal, too expected, completely lacking the fascination and vertigo of death as it operates in the real world. Death is pure potentiality. It is an island, a fast car in a parking lot, fast food as suicide in slow motion, the stability of a system not in operation. It is the donkey that collapses rather than cast its vote. (“All this and more!”)

As from the position from which I’m writing these words, I am already (thoroughly) biologically dead – deprived of even metaphor to clothe me.

Thanks to Henry Andersen.

Aline Bouvy (b. 1974) lives and works in Brussels. Recent solo exhibitions include “Urine Mate” at Albert Baronian gallery (2016), Brussels; “Sorry I slept with your dog” at Exo Exo (2015), Paris and “New Pablum” in collaboration with Simon Davenport at Kunstraum (2015), London. She has also participated in group exhibitions such as “Friendly Faces” curated by Middlemarch at Johannes Vogt gallery (2015), New York; “I’MTen”at IMT Gallery (2015), London; “Trust” (with the After Lucy Experiment) curated by Sonia Dermience at the Copenhagen Art Festival (2015) and has previously exhibited at Material Art Fair in Mexico with Komplot. Together with artist Xavier Mary she curated “Acid Rain” at Island (2014), Brussels and “To blow smoke in order to heal”, at Albert Baronian Gallery (2015), Brussels.

Bunk Club is a non-profit contemporary art initiative founded in Brussels in 2011 by Laurence Dujardyn and Mathias Wille, focusing on the publication of a series of “FAN OF” zines and editions as well as organizing exhibitions at itinerant locations.