Curated by Ken Pratt

Centrifugal @ Trajector Art Fair 23 to 25 April 2010
- Hotel Bloom! - rue royale/Koningstraat 250 - Brussels - Room 120

Carla Arocha + Stéphane Schraenen, Bettina Carl, Jasmina Cibic, Alex Hudson, Eemyun Kang, Anne-Mie van Kerckhoven, Uta Kögelsberger, Sadie Murdoch, Morten Viskum

‘Appropriate Modernism’ is a thematic presentation. It offers something of a nod to the location of a hotel room revamped over the skeleton of a building dating from the dying days of a certain modernist vernacular, yet it is not ‘site specific’. The presentation concerns itself with a cohort of very different artists whose work directly references or appropriates modernist visual and operative languages, simultaneously engaging with the political modalities contained in notions or the residues of modernism (or, indeed, Modernism) and its readings.

In the work of some of the artists the feminist issues relating to Modernism are addressed; others engage with the poetics of its ideologies. And others still use its aesthetic structures as an opening for a discussion of the ethics of science. Some even continue its formal tradtions, albeit with a practice informed by much more recent developments since the advent of conceptual art.

The tendency to revisit Modernism in art works has gained increasing visibility in recent years, particularly for a certain generation of artists. ‘Appropriate Modernism’ aims to offer something of a counterbalance to cast of ‘usual suspects’, focusing its attention on artists whose practice has addressed the topic for years and/or artists whose work approaches the topic from less direct routes.

www.trajectorartfair.org
www.centrifugalprojects.org
www.artbrussels.be