DÉJÀ-VU. REPETITION AND DIFFERENCE

This exhibition will reveal an until now untreated theme in the field of artists' publications: the fascinating conjunctions between the phenomenons of trivial products of the everyday life and art works. In the confrontation of mass-media publications with artists' publications, the exhibition will create an open stage on which formal coincidences are shown as inspiration resources and on which meanings and effects are made by the context in which the respective publications are presented and perceived. A limited section will show the revers side of the theme. It will point out how designers, advertisers, and aesthetic advisors plagiarize and transform, reedit and remix the aesthetics of historical and contemporary art works into new scenarios of their publications in the culture of visual marketing.

Both parts of the exhibition will reveal the accordingly correspondences by presenting each document with its original parallel. Presented are trivial publications such as magazines, newspapers, industrial catalogues, games, publicity material, popular entertainment, trash press, scientific publications, school manuals encyclopedias, etc. as well as artists' publications from the 1960s until the most recent period.

The public will discover the art works from an unexpected perspective as well as they can refresh their memory which was wiped away by the fast development of the media. Therefore the exhibition can also be seen as a discovery of certain aspects of the contemporary art parallel to a voyage into the past.

The spill of the exhibition will be a recently rediscovered, rare exemplar of the second volume of the Japanese architecture book Ginza Haccho (1954) by Yoshikazu Suzuki, presented alongside with an ikon of artists' books, Every Building on the Sunset Strip (1965) by Ed Ruscha, published 12 years later. Side by side the two accordion foldout formats present astonishing similarity in their concept. Coincidence or inspiration?

Curator: Guy Schraenen