Jill Magid at M – Museum Leuven

Artist: Jill Magid

Exhibition title: The Migration of the Wings

Curated by: Valerie Verhack

Venue: M – Museum Leuven, Leuven, Belgium

Date: April 7 – September 10, 2023

Photography: all images courtesy of the artist and M – Museum Leuven

M Leuven is presenting the premiere of a new production by American artist, writer and filmmaker Jill Magid. This first solo exhibition by Jill Magid in Belgium follows the movements and resonances of, The Holy Sacrament triptych (1464-8) by Dieric Bouts, one of Leuven’s most iconic images.

The exhibition explores themes of exile and diaspora, war and repatriation, through sculpture and a film and sound installation. The film follows the movements of the triptych (1464-8) by Dieric Bouts, commissioned for St. Peter’s Church. In 1707, the triptych was dismembered and the central panel representing The Last Supper was stripped of its wings. In modern history, the wings continued to travel, through legal means and by force, as reparations of war between Germany and Belgium. The work probes at the striking contrast between the central panel’s stillness and the constant movement of the outer wings, which both depict and enact scenes of Jewish diaspora.

‘The Migration of the Wings’ is a visual and sonic meditation on the forced migration of the triptych ‘The Last Supper’ (1464-1468) by Dieric Bouts, which was dismembered in 1707 and stripped of its wings. Throughout the painting’s history, the wings, depicting scenes of Jewish diaspora from the Old Testament, have been repeatedly stolen, exploited as commodities, used as political tools of negotiation and as reparations of war. Meanwhile, the central panel, which shows a nearly still scene from the New Testament, has remained at Saint Peter’s Church in Leuven.

American artist Jill Magid evokes the cyclical movement of the wings through sculpture and a two-channel film that enters the interior spaces where the wings traveled. In the 19th Century, the panels were split between the Alte Pinakothek in Munich and the Bode Museum in Berlin. In 1919, as stipulated in The Treaty of Versailles, they were returned to Leuven only to be forcibly removed by the Nazis in 1942. They were then buried in the salt mines of Austria until 1945 when they were recovered by American soldiers and returned to Leuven, where they remain today, hinged to the central panel.

As in much of Magid’s practice, this new body of work intimately questions how objects can be deployed as political pawns, and how these objects come to contain the traces of violence that resonate throughout history, if we listen.

Jill Magid (USA, 1973) lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. She has exhibited her work in solo exhibitions including at Tate Modern, The Modern Art Museum Fort Worth, Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo (MUAC), The Renaissance Society, Magasin III Museum of Contemporary Art, and the Security and Intelligence Agency of the Netherlands. Magid is a recent awardee of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Fellowship and VIA Art Fund, and The Calder Prize. Her award-winning feature film ‘The Proposal’ (2018) was released in theaters internationally. Her work is in the collections of the Centre Pompidou, Whitney Museum, Fundacion Jumex, Walker Art Center, and the United States Mint, among others.

Jill Magid, The Migration of The Wings, 2023, two-channel digital video, sound