Artist: Marie-Jo Lafontaine
Exhibition title: SUMMER BAR + CINEMA
Venue: Tick Tack, Antwerp, Belgium
Date: July 19 – August 31, 2024
Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and Tick Tack, Antwerp
This summer, TICK TACK transforms into SUMMER BAR + CINEMA, a singular vision by the renowned Belgian artist, Marie-Jo Lafontaine, born 1950 in Antwerp.
Lafontaine is a video artist, painter and photographer, renowned for her pioneering monumental video installations in the 1970’s and 80’s. These sculptural presentations redefined the possibilities of the medium, establishing her as one of the leading international video artists of the last century. Lafontaine has earned the Belgian Art Prize (1977) and played a prominent role in documenta 8 (1987). For the FIFA World Cup in Germany (2006), she produced a series of video works that were projected onto Frankfurt’s skyline.
On the occasion of her solo exhibition in Antwerp, Lafontaine re-imagines TICK TACK’s brutalist exhibition venue as a social sculpture and rebuilds the space, both in form and function, into a summer bar and movie theater. Here, Lafontaine uses TT’s strategic position, on the border of public and private space, to draw the outside world in and bridge multiple audiences into a new and shared cultural experience.
The entire space undergoes a change: the top floor and basement are re-envisioned as intimate free-of-charge cinemas offering complimentary screenings of Lafontaine’s films, which delve into the complex interplay of human identity caught between extremes of passion, violence, and sexuality. Meanwhile, the ground floor features her acclaimed Liquid Crystals series (1999), a photographic journey into the ephemeral world of youth, capturing the fleeting moments of transition into adulthood on the streets of ’90s Antwerp.
In the musical road movie Brussels Swings (2017) Marie-Jo Lafontaine takes an approach that captures the energy of musicians, listeners, and a city on the move. The pulse of Brussels is revealed through music that describes its diversity, ranging from the plaintive tone of the cello to Congolese rumba, punk to electro-acoustic music, noise rock to opera, the melancholy of the accordion to rap.
In Dance The World (2008) Marie-Jo Lafontaine creates a circle where the forces of life and death meet. The artist observes the new growth in today’s world with one eye, and with the other, she sees the unchanging human drives that have existed since the beginning of humanity. People are caught in a cycle they create themselves. The balance between choosing life and leaning toward self-destruction affects not just their personal lives, but also their relationships with others and the world around them. Lafontaine auscultates the phenomena that give rise to paroxysmal moments: eroticism and violence, knowing that there is interference, chiasmus, the violence of eroticism, and the eroticism of violence.
The series of black and white portraits of adolescents Liquid Crystals (1999) were made by Lafontaine in a temporary set-up studio on the street where people could come in and be photographed. The title evokes the adolescent as a being in the making, malleable, plastic, a still liquid crystal, which will harden over the years. An ephemeral form, the passage between childhood and adulthood, adolescence is captured in the phenomenology of a being in the world. Considered as a gateway to the other, establishing a triangular relationship between the artist, the young people photographed, and the spectator, photography seeks to capture the diversity of the processes of subjectivization, the differences in the expression of self that young girls and young men display.
During multiple events throughout the exhibition, the SUMMER BAR will host musicians and other artists to activate the venue and its audiences in a variety of different ways, creating a crossroads experience for multiple communities.
