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One of the recent additions to the evolving artistic landscape in Brussels is the artist-run non-profit initiative The Artists Club Coffre-Fort, set up towards the end of last year by three individuals Thibaut Espiau, Ištvan Išt Huzjan and Gregoire Motte, who have been running this studio and exhibition space in the vault of a former jeweller that they have turned into a white cube. Since then, they have been organising an energetic series of exhibitions at the space, focusing on supporting experimental practices and the production of new work. Their most recent exhibition, by Irish artist Ella de Burca, who is currently based in Brussels, continued this ethos. Her exhibition at The Artists Club responded to the physical context of the space and its surrounds, and as well as to being the first woman artists to have a solo exhibition at the space. The exhibition itself was the presentation of a sparse display within the vault, which was the delicate trace of a wider process-based mode of collaboration.

For her project, entitled Illuminating Kunstholes, de Burca invited the three men who run this space to individually go on a walk with her, on a route they themselves would guide. They were to use this excursion moment to think about their locale in Brussels, the physical and social context of their artistic initiative, and also their role as (male) cultural mediators. They were tasked also with finding a spot where the sun never shines, and then to paint it black. In addition, the artist took along a camera loaded with medium format negative film, to take a limited number of images at certain points along the route of their preference, as well as this final spot of their choice. Following this series of walks, the ample cubic space of The Artist Club Coffre Fort vault was subsequently turned into a functioning photographic darkroom where de Burca processed the negative films and produced a photo positive contact print of each. Sometimes being of their surroundings, sometimes including points of darkness in the landscape, sometimes with themselves or the artist partially visible, the image strips individually give us a glimpse of the dérive between the artist and the mediators.

The contrast of light and dark recurs in this exhibition – whether in the walk or in the black and white photographs, but also in their print production too. The interior of the vault was made into a clinical white cube space by the three initiators of The Artists Club at its launch, and it is the artist who then turned it into a darkroom, and who then returned it to being a gleaming white cube for the public display of the images. The images hang side-by-side from a thread that is suspended across three of the walls, which provides in itself a trace of the darkroom as it was where the wet images would have been hung to dry after development. The resulting three image sequences are at the threshold of being both abstract and pictorial, providing a sort of fragmented narrative of the journeys – traces of an experience we know has happened but which we attempt to mentally redraw through the register of the photographic. What is curious is how much crossover there is in the three men’s routes, even ending just a few metres from each other. The river Zenne (in Dutch, Senne in French) running through Brussels also acts as a focus of each of their walks, perhaps drawing out an essence of their like-mindedness.

The exhibition is one that effectively manages to combine both poetry and critique. It is the result of a willing collaboration between an artist and her mediators in a way that is reflexive of their roles as curators of experimental art. In the process, it also opens a window onto the discursive relations people in these respective roles have during the process of organising an exhibition. In a window at the entrance of the exhibition space is a poem, something de Burca writes regularly as part of her practice. It is an enigmatic text written directly onto the glass, evoking the regular moments of walking in the urban context, our encounters in the everyday, and also of being part of an artistic community. Again, like the image strips exhibited, it aims to reflect the abstraction inherent in our daily experience – the unexplainable things that form part of our individual reality, and the complexity of our lives in the city.

Elle de Burca
The Artists Club Coffre-Fort, Brussels
4 – 18 May 2013

Nav Haq is curator of M HKA in Antwerp