Untitled Ceremony #16, Béatrice Balcou

ROZENSTRAAT is proud to announce Untitled Ceremony #16 Béatrice Balcou, a performance including a presentation of works, organised in collaboration with Tlön Projects.

Tlön Projects invites curators, artists, authors and thinkers to enter into a dialogue with and develop innovative, noteworthy presentations of works on the basis of their imaginary collection or “museum without walls” at different locations. French artist Béatrice Balcou (1976) will select an as yet unknown work from the collection in the context of a ceremony as well as presenting new works from the series Porteurs and Containers which she made in 2020.

Béatrice Balcou’s works are well thought-out exercises in attention – that increasingly scarce and yet, oh so precious of human capacities. Over the years, she has developed an oeuvre that purposefully explores the boundaries between art and framework. Since 2013, Balcou has been working on a series entitled Untitled Ceremonies, performative actions that take place around an existing artwork from a public or private collection. The work in question is carefully unwrapped and re-packed in the presence of a limited audience as part of a gestural choreography that focuses attention on the work’s concrete materiality. During Balcou’s secular ceremonies the works are declaimed as it were; they are – temporarily – released from the obscurity of the collection and revealed to an audience. There is phenomenological pleasure to be had from the way the work’s meaning is divested of every utility or exchange value solely by interacting with it as well as how it declares its independence from every economic framework before it is returned to storage. The same applies to Balcou’s series of placebo sculptures (2014 – present), wooden replicas of artworks featured in ceremonies. These wooden objects originally served as substitutes or props for rehearsing the ceremonies, yet have slowly, but surely demanded autonomy.

Untitled Ceremony #16 will occasion the publication of the essay Ceremonies, Relics and Props – On Béatrice Balcou’s Work written by art historian, lecturer, researcher and curator Pieter Vermeulen (Antwerp, 1983).

Béatrice Balcou was born in Tréguier, France in 1976. She lives and works in Brussels. Various international institutions including M Museum, Leuven; La Ferme du Buisson CAC; Casino Luxembourg CAF, Luxembourg; Le Quartier CAC, Quimper; and the FRAC Franche-Comté, Besançon have organised solo or duo exhibitions featuring her work. Furthermore, her work has been exhibited at Jeu de Paume, Paris;FRAC Champagne-Ardenne, Reims; Fondation  FRAC Bretagne, Rennes; WIELS, Brussels; FRAC Franche-Comté, Besançon; Centre Pompidou, Paris; and the Palais de Tokyo, Paris.

Performance times:

05.11.2021 17:00

06.11.2021 14:00 and 17:00

07.11.2021 11:00

A ticket for attending a performance is required.

You can book a ticket here: satellite.eventgoose.com

Curators:

Chris Bestebreurtje and Petra Kuipers