All Our Yesterdays
IKOB – Museum für Zeitgenössiche Kunst, 2023With works by Lili Dujourie, Sophie Nys and Angyvir Padilla.
The group exhibition “All our yesterdays” traces a lineage between three Belgium-based artists of different generations: Lili Dujourie (b. 1941), Sophie Nys (b. 1974), and Angyvir Padilla (b. 1987). The exhibited works encompass sculpture, installation, photography, film, sound, and performance, and span a timeframe of over fifty years (1969–2023).
By subverting signifiers of the domestic and destabilizing established artistic categories, the exhibition offers a fragmented narrative on temporality, memory, and loss. The artists consider how the body moves through time and space, leaving traces. They use the strategies of conceptual art but challenge its authority through a deep engagement with the physicality of their materials and a surrender to feeling.
The exhibition is titled after a 1952 novel by Natalia Ginzburg set in Italy during the Second World War, in which a young female protagonist gradually crystallizes from a complex web of family relations. Her personal life is placed within the radical social and political changes taking place around her. The exhibition echoes the intertwining of the inner and outer lives, the private and public worlds of human beings.
Sophie Nys mobilizes the latent meaning of forms and symbols with precision and a healthy dose of wit. Her water clock, fashioned from plastic buckets, refers to the klepsydra, an ancient technique that uses water to mark time. Other works by Sophie in the exhibition reference everyday objects but verge into suggestive territory: a leather bench to rest one’s knees, oversized toilet paper rolls made from yoga mats, deflated bouncing balls perched atop metal scaffolding. For Lits de camp [cots], the artist hiked for 19 kilometers while pulling ten meters of canvas behind her, thus ‘painting’ its surface through her movement. In each of these scenarios, the human body is absent but lingering, hovering between exhaustion and pleasure.
Lili Dujourie is one of the most significant artists of her generation and has a special ability to connect with viewers both on an intellectual and a sensory level. The collage work Roman (5) is deceptively simple: Four tiny magazine snippets are glued on a long sheet of paper, the emptiness more dominant than the content. As in her canonical steel plate work Côté Couleurs, Côté Douleurs [Side of Colors, Side of Pains], the artist plays a game of exposure and concealment. She draws upon the sleek, industrial vocabulary of Minimalism while breaking it through her painterly gesture. The silent film Passion de l’été pour l’hiver [Summer’s passion for winter] is a slow, lingering search for stillness—this tension between movement and stasis is echoed in Memoires van de handen [Memories of the hands], sculptures shaped by the artist pressing her hands into clay.
Angyvir Padilla creates mixed-media installations that deal with the notions of home and memory. The works in the exhibition are rooted in an archive of photographs taken inside the artist’s childhood home, documenting the overwhelming piles of clothing her mother sells from their Caracas apartment. The artist printed these images onto costumes made of plaster and brought them to life in a performance during the exhibition opening. In another work, the artist has shrouded the images in wax and draped them over precarious metal structures. Nearby, a record plays the bolero classic Contigo En La Distancia [With you in the distance], recorded by Lucho Gatica in 1952, in reverse, a reminder of the impossibility to return to the past. Its sounds still reverberate through the space when encountering an installation of 3D printed sculptures, embedded in sand: a collaboration with the artist’s mother, who sent her snapshots of toys and domestic objects around the house. Breaking down the oppositions of documentation and memory, distance and desire, the lasting and the ephemeral, Angyvir brings us closer to an experience of reality by always slightly effacing it.
Supported by the Flemish government / Kunstenpunt.
Click here to view and download exhibition handout designed and hand-drawn by Julien Fargetton.
Photography: Lola Pertsowsky
The public programme for this exhibition included a screening in the Cinema Eupen of Chantal Akerman’s film Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles. Click here for more information.