Eine Stadt als Atelier

The exhibition at the Kölnischer Kunstverein brings together works by thirty-five artists and filmmakers. Many of them are characterised by an ambiguous, at times melancholic tone, suggesting a distant kinship with the muted atmosphere of Flemish painting. Other works are marked by a subtle humour and formal vocabulary whose rough-hewn and fragile aesthetic might be described as fragmentary, enigmatic and at times surreal.

Certain artistic approaches also evoke Situationist practices: the "construction of situations" as a form of everyday revolution, or the derive, the Situationist principle of deliberate drifting according to a self-determined logic, remain more than mere theory in Brussels. Their traces, translated into the present, appear in an artistic attitude that does not regard the city as a fixed stage, but rather as a space of experience for deviation, drift and appropriation.