Artist: Han Hoogerbrugge
Exhibition title: Limbo Lottery
Venue: Base-Alpha, Antwerp, Belgium
Date: December 17, 2016 – February 4, 2017
Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and Base-Alpha, Antwerp
Zoetrope:
A zoetrope consists of an upright cylinder with vertical slits. When the cylinder rotates and you look trough the slits, you can see the images, which are mounted on the inside of the cylinder wall. Because the images are just briefly visible, they appear to flow into each other, which creates the illusion of a moving picture. The term “Zoetrope” is derived from the Greek words “life” and “turn”. The zoetrope was invented in 1834 and was commonly known as The Wheel of Life, the forerunner of animation.
The 3D zoetrope of Hoogerbrugge fits in his ode to the imperfect human being. The unfaithful husband, the failing chairman, a fraudulent CEO… These are wandering figures who constantly commit the same sins. They were among more protagonists in Hoogerbrugge’s Prostress comic who appeared daily on the NBC site for a year. They were reviewed next to political figures such as Putin and Nicolas Sarkozy, and also (deceased) famous figures from the entertainment business. They are people that assume a certain expectation, but rarely deliver on this. Their failure is recognizable, there is something wrong with us all.
It is with The March of Folly that Hoogerbrugge elaborates “the man who is always loaded with sins”. Sins have always existed and their meaning is more or less fixed, but the symbols and images that represent these sins are closely connected to the actual time we live in.
With Limbo Lottery Hoogerbrugge shows us the symbols that represent our sins today. Thumbs-up smileys, cosmetics, modern expressions to which we daily refer to fit in. The animationloop reminds us that we are more repetitive than progressive with our lives. The movement is repeated eternally under the echo of strobe light as a prophetic message through space. Man will repeatedly commit the same sins.
