Koenraad Dedobbeleer: The Desperate, Furiously Positive Striving of People Who Refuse to Be Dismissed

Extra City presents three artistic projects that look at 'the real' and its avatars, verisimilitude and artifice, proposing open-ended configurations of figures and grounds, actors and stages, movements and dei ex machina.

Koenraad Dedobbeleer: The Desperate, Furiously Positive Striving of People Who Refuse to Be Dismissed The exhibition brings together new and existing works by Koenraad Dedobbeleer (b. 1975, Brussels), as well as works and reproductions of works by artists, designers or architects who have had a transformative role in the evolution of his practice. A striking scenography of podiums and prosthetic pedestals highlights the operations that articulate Dedobbeleer's investigation, but also the points where the practice is anchored in art history – via affinity or difference, similarity or friction. The installation does not distinguish emphatically between constituents, between own work and that of another, or between work and document; rather, the interaction of these distinct objects proposes an imaginative engagement that goes beyond norms of attribution, authorship and museological decorum.

Which specificities constitute contemporary sculpture, and what is the threshold between material intervention, functionality and aesthetic value? Always present in Dedobbeleer's work, these questions are brought to the fore and interwoven in an allegorical dialogue between objects, documents and spectators, maquettes and actual spaces, modes of making and un-making. This choreographed installation juxtaposes scales and regimes of value, things-in-themselves and things-as-proxies competing for significance, categories in disarray and a challenging exploration of artistic subjectivity: never autonomous, subjectivity is always enmeshed with the biographies of the objects that express and sustain it.

Exhibition co-produced with GAK – Gesellschaft fur aktuelle kunst, Bremen, where a version of the project will be presented in the second half of 2014. An edition project accompanying the exhibition is realized with support from Galerie Micheline Szwajcer, Antwerp, Mai 36 Galerie, Zurich, and S.M.A.K., Ghent.

Koenraad Dedobbeleer: The Desperate, Furiously Positive Striving of People Who Refuse to Be Dismissed

artist:
Koenraad Dedobbeleer