Tony Oursler "Phantasmagoria"

The Modern Art Museum of the Wallonia-Brussels Federation invites you to Belgium’s first ever monographic museum exhibition dedicated to Tony Oursler.

By departing from the predefined framework when dreaming up his projections, Tony Oursler revolutionised the art of the video, notably with his “sculpture-screen” concept. Today he is one of the greatest American visual artists of our era and is the man behind, amongst others, David Bowie’s Where are we now? video. His art takes us to unexpected universes where fragments of bodies, ghosts and dolls mingle.

Charmed by the Grand-Hornu as a place of remembrance, as well as by the architectural spaces occupied by the Modern Art Museum of the Wallonia-Brussels Federation – MAC’s, the artist came up with two new works especially for the occasion. In the first he invests the tombs in the mausoleum of the De Gorge family, founder of the site, in the second he pays homage to Étienne-Gaspard Robertson, the Liège scholar who invented phantasmagory back in the 18th century. The rest of the exhibition, which does not aspire to be a retrospective, will be dedicated to significant earlier works from his creative universe.

In parallel to the event, the museum is editing, in coproduction with the Mercator Fund, an extensively illustrated major anthology of texts which Oursler asked the characters in his videos to utter, just like a director would, since the end of the 1970s. The work will be available in French and English.