Antwerp is not only a hot insider’s tip for contemporary art of international standard – including such artists as Panamarenko, Jan Fabre and Luc Tuymans – but it also has a story to tell about the image in general, one of worldwide importance. Everyone knows Rubens, the supplier of baroque images to the whole of Europe. But not many know that the international art market came into being in Antwerp a century before Rubens. In the early modern period, Antwerp was the place where the image was marketed and democratised. It was here that the first ‘independent’ paintings were turned out by mass production for an anonymous market, and out of this arose the various painting ‘genres’. One of the largest printing centres in the world was to be found here, producing and internationally distributing printed matter on a massive scale, and another export was cabinets, furniture in which modern man could display his curiosity.

In this exhibition, these ‘hidden treasures’ that helped shape European modernity and thereby our global mass media are for the first time being brought together in a way that’s accessible to the general public. This is done in a confrontation between the past, from the Late Middle Ages onwards, with innovative contemporary art, which produces images of a different nature from those in the mass media.

Charif Benhelima will be participating in the FotoFest 2012 Biennial, the Fourteenth International Biennial of Photography and Photo-related Art.

Charif Benhelima (b. 1967, Brussels) is a Belgian artist, Sephardic and Arabic roots. His entire oeuvre is a photographic study of identity and to feel an outsider. The next topic is the reflection on the medium an important issue in the artistic practice of the artist.

For the series ‘Semites’ (2005) chose Charif Benhelima the Polaroid camera as a tool. The Polaroid provides a 1-on-a-picture it: the moment crystallized them directly into a picture. This picture is immediately the final result. “Semites” includes 135 Polaroid photographs of existing images (ie reproduction through the Polaroid camera), in which the flash of the Polaroid camera is clearly visible. The reflection of this light shines on the original image and is visible on the final result, the Polaroid picture.

“In New York, to my surprise I faced with the fact that my name, Benhelima, of Jewish origin and that the work has” Semites “affected. The Polaroid 600 as a tool and by questioning the concepts of identity and reality that I developed myself a fake documentary work call.
By a panel of images of Jewish, Arab, Sephardic Jewish portraits and portraits of myself together to create hanging I have a personal document, a collage of images of opposing identities confusing and create even more disorientation.This will create a link with the vague memories we have of our childhood. The memories I have of my parents are rather vague. ” (From An Van Dienderen of talking with Charif Benhelima)

Exclusively for this exhibition in Be-Part, platform for contemporary art, the full set of 135 Polaroids into cibachromeprints, their place in an impressive “wall”, a wall under construction .

However, in spite of its name, ‘SuperBodies’ is not an exhibition about super-bodies and super-people. On the contrary, it is actually about just regular bodies. Because even though bodies are not all that extraordinary or perfect, they do wonderful things—they are, in fact, wonderful machines.

‘SuperBodies’ explores thus the fascination of many artists and designers for the way in which our body secretly moulds and shapes our experiences. The exhibition presents the body in all of its often half-conscious operations. A large, interactive ensemble of works from visual artists, choreographers and (fashion-) designers makes us see and feel the body as the source of our thoughts and emotions. Upcoming and internationally established artists and designers operate on the boundaries between disciplines to unravel the mysteries of the body. Of course, not only are fashion, design and contemporary art all present in ‘SuperBodies’. There are also choreographers present in the exhibition, in some places with physical works of art and in others with performances.

The whole of the city of Hasselt will qualify as a stage, but the main focus will be on larger venues such as the Cultural Center, the house for contemporary art Z33, theFashion Museum, CIAP and the city museum Het Stadsmus.

Who’s is Pieter T’Jonck
Curator Pieter T’Jonck is an engineer-architect. He has had his own firm since 1986. Furthermore, he is one of Belgium’s most important dance critics. He has been a contributor to innumerable domestic and international newspapers, magazines and radio. He has also worked on various books about theatre, dance, architecture, urban development and the visual arts.

Artists
Vincen Beeckman (1973, BE), Sylvia Bossu (1962-1995, FR), Louise Bourgeois (1911-2010, FR), Trisha Brown (1936, US), Fernando & Humberto Campana (1953 & 1961, BR), Boris Charmatz (1973, FR), Lygia Clark (1920-1988, BR), Contredanse (Baptiste Andrien & Florence Corin) (BE), Christophe Coppens (1969, BE), Theo Cowley (1976, GB), Christoph De Boeck (1972, BE), Deufert & Plischke (1973 & 1971, DE), Ivo Dimchev (1967, BU), Angelo Figus (1975, IT), Naomi Filmer (1969, GB), William Forsythe (1949, US), Lisbeth Gruwez (1977, BE), Ann Veronica Janssens (1956, BE), Eric Joris (1954, BE) + CREW, Hannah Joris (1984, BE), Rei Kawakubo (1942, JP), Kaisu Koski (1975, FI), Ginna Lee (1982, KR), Bernhard Leitner (1938, AT), Jorge León (1967, BE), Lemm&Barkey (ID & BE), Bernd Lohaus (1940-2010, DE), Lawrence Malstaf (1972, BE), Martin Margiela (1957, BE), Linda Molenaar (1972, NL), Jean-Luc Moulène (1955, FR), Matt Mullican (1953, US), Ernesto Neto (1964, BR), Anna Opperman (1940-1993, FR), Steve Paxton (1939, US), Gaetano Pesce (1939, IT), Piero Gatti (1940, IT), Cesare Paolini (1937, IT) & Franco Teodoro (1939, IT), Michelangelo Pistoletto (1933, IT), Gio Ponti (1891-1979, IT), Janneke Raaphorst (NL), Liesje Reyskens (1984, BE), Martin Riches (1941, UK), Kiki Smith (1954, US), Erwin Stache (1960, DE), Meg Stuart (1965, US), Studio 65 (1965, IT), Superamas (1999, AT/BE/FR), Ilke Theeuwes (1986, BE), Marloeke van der Vlugt (1971, NL), Danny Venlet (1958, AU), Junya Watanabe (1961, JP), Franz West (1947, AT), Yang Zhenzhong (1968, CN), Anna-Nicole Ziesche (1972, DE), Zhang Huan (1965, CN)

Flanders House is currently showing an exhibition of 22 works by Flemish photographers that illuminate the pictorial skill, expertise, and diversity of the visual art scene in Flanders. The survey includes examples of documentary photography, portrait photography, landscape photography, and commercial photography.

Highlights include a series of four photographs by the renowned and influential photographer Harry Gruyaert, who has been a member of Magnum’s elite group of documentary photographers; and a rare portrait of Paul McCartney by Herman Selleslags, who documented both national and international events for almost half a century and was a photographer for the popular entertainment magazine Humo.

The exhibition can be visited by appointment only during weekdays, between 3 pm – 5pm. For inquiries, please contact info@flandershouse.org.

Photographic Mission: Transgenic Landscape proposes to reflect on the architecture and landscape of Guimarães as a cultural construction. Commissioned by Paulo Catrica and Pedro Bandeira, the project challenges four different artists, Katalin Deér, Filip Dujardin, JH Engstrom and Guido Guidi, all of whom use photography for aesthetical and critical reflection, to look upon a territory that strives to resist the economic crisis that lasts for a few years now, moreover since the global markets dislocated the textile industry. The geographer Álvaro Domingues named this territory, Guimarães and the Vale do Ave, a “transgenic landscape”: a schizophrenic place, polarised between the “extraordinary” city filed with memories, narratives and identities, and the “ordinary” landscape, generic, diffused, where the remains of the rural world have dissolved among factories, meadows, thickets, houses and roads. The intention of this mision is to propel an imaginary “fictional” photographic construction that could reflect upon the indexical properties of the medium, and its documental ability, while considering and making use of the nouvelle paradigms that photographs seem to implicate nowadays. Somewhere between analogue reality and digital veracity.

The Hermitage Amsterdam will present, alongside the world-famous Flemish old master paintings in the exhibition Rubens, Van Dyck & Jordaens, the work of eight Young Flemish Masters at the Hermitage Amsterdam. This project, to be displayed on the first floor of the Herenvleugel, will show how a new generation of Flemish artists has drawn inspiration from the exhibition Rubens, Van Dyck & Jordaens.

Discover Garage Rotterdam and the first exhibition at the Museum Night Hermetic City. Enjoy boundless ideas and wild ideas, shaped by eight artists to create order in the inner and outer world.

The Hermitage Amsterdam will present, alongside the world-famous Flemish old master paintings in the exhibitionRubens, Van Dyck & Jordaens, the work of eight Young Flemish Masters at the Hermitage Amsterdam. This project, to be displayed on the first floor of the Herenvleugel, will show how a new generation of Flemish artists has drawn inspiration from the exhibition Rubens, Van Dyck & Jordaens.