Nicolas Bourriaud – författare

Angel Vergara’s work tests the limits of art and reality by questioning the way the contemporary image shapes the intermingled public and private spheres—as well as our own experience  Angel Vergara’s (b. 1958; based in Brussels) work is a continued investigation into the power of the image. By means of performances, videos, installations, paintings and drawings, he tests the limits of art and reality. Each of his works is an attempt to break through the image and to make its impact on an aesthetic as well as a sociocultural and political level. Thus, Vergara creates a new, suspended reality, grown from the artist’s personal dialogue with reality and with the image by which it has already been transformed. Decontextualised images of reality are mediated by the artist and transformed into art, encouraging the viewer to question their way of perceiving the everyday as well as the way it is presented to them in images. Vergara’s art disorients and disconcerts the viewer. It questions what is known and opens paths to new modes of signification.Accompanying the 2023 retrospective exhibition “In the Instant” that the MACS is dedicating to Angel Vergara, this important book reviews the career of the Belgian artist and highlights the close relationship between his painting and the cinematic medium.  Distributed for Mercatorfonds  Exhibition Schedule:  02.11.2022–02.06.2023Outside installation. Musée de la batellerie—Conflans Sainte Honorine, France.  24.11.2022–19.03.2023Photo Brut - Centrale for Contemporary Art, Brussels  23.04.2023–08.10.2023Angel Vergara. In a Moment. Monographic exhibition. MAC’s in Mons, Belgium.

Leading theorist and art curator Nicolas Bourriaud tackles the excluded, the disposable and the nature of waste by looking to the future of art-the exform.He argues that the great theoretical battles to come will be fought in the realms of ideology, psychoanalysis and art. A "realist" theory and practice must begin by uncovering the mechanisms that create the distinctions between the productive and unproductive, product and waste, and the included and excluded.To do this we must go back to the towering theorist of ideology Louis Althusser and examine how ideology conditions political discourse in ways that normalize cultural, racial and economic practices of exclusion.

The works by the conceptual artist Loris Gréaud include installations, films, and architecture, as does his long-term project taking place around the world, The Unplayed Notes. Viewers encounter an experimental field of diverse media, all of which attempt to give form to temperature, light waves, or time. Gréaud is interested in the stages of artistic production. The process of searching per se becomes visible in his installations. This book reveals the development of his art, in accordance with the ideas of Karlheinz Stockhausen, which gave the book its name: the actual meaning of a work lies in its unplayed, unheard notes. It includes as well an introduction to his upcoming project The Underground Sculpture Park that will be inaugurated in the Oaxaca desert and two complementary essays by the artist’s long-time collaborator, outstanding theorist, and curator Nicolas Bourriaud.Bilingual: English and French.