Artist: Lieven Segers
Exhibition title: Niets aan de hand, Niets in de mouw, Niets tegen de muur
Venue: Base-Alpha, Antwerp, Belgium
Date: May 19 – July 1, 2017
Photography: We Document Art, all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and Base-Alpha, Antwerp
Base-Alpha Gallery represents contemporary artists with a very particular artistic parcours. Progressive solos are alterneted with stubborn curated groupshows.
Lieven Segers (°1975) is known hir his photos, drawings, performances and poems in which humor and self-reflection are taking key roles. Segers unravels and penetrates gathered stories, encounters and unexpected events from the everyday life. He then bend it to their own ideas, renewed notions and critical insights.
At the end of 2014, Lieven Segers was handing out colourfull ‘Sharing is Caring”-leaflets to people he met in bars and clubs. This was an invitation to share their drunken nightly thoughts with him by texting him troughout the night.
More than 300 texst messages later, these statements will take form as sculpture-like figures. Or more like some type of deviant furniture that feels bizar and awkwardly humorous at the same time. Their white painted bodies and black heads are scattered, almost disorientated, throughout the gallery as a forest of wandering spokespersons of the night.
Lieven Segers deliberately left the walls untouched, to avoid a too obvious processing of the “Sharing is Caring”-project.
By creating these figures by himself, without any preknowledge about woodworking or joinery, they eradiate a clumsily and uneasily atmosphere – again totally in accordance with the received nightly thoughts.
As spectator you have to manouvre trough the cluster of these woozy contours, while their drunken statements are humming and echoing throughout the gallery space.
Of all the messages that reached Segers during this project, it is a selection of the absurd as of the unimportant, the dull as the interesting, the hilarious and the painful, the vulgar, honest and excessive sides of life, that makes it just as fascinating.
The result of “Sharing is Caring” is presented as an edition that compiles the whole of messages, each one of them with a unique gawky figure who honour and indulge these fantastic nightly experiences.
It is an homage to our own mighty and crooked fantasy, with wich we all – from time to time – do want to identify.
Ariba la luna!
