Featured Artists :
Isabelle Arthuis, Elina Brotherus, Vicente De Mello, JH Engström, Enikö Hangay, Isabelle Hayeur, Philippe Herbet, Angel Marcos, Alain Paiement , Sébastien Reuzé, Satoru Toma.
For its summer exhibition, the CRP/ is teaming up with Contretype, the contemporary photography center in Brussels, to co-construct a project based on their respective collections, born of the production and residency activity of these two organizations.
In its gallery in Douchy-les-Mines, the art center is presenting an exhibition on the artistic and poetic perspective of artists on the City, through a selection of works from Contretype’s collection. This art center dedicated to photography has been offering a residency program since 1997, inviting artists from around the world to confront the European capital. The aim is for them to redeploy their research in contact with Brussels, producing works that now make up an exceptional collection of images on the city, throwing light on its multiple, shifting identities.
In Athens, public transport vehicles are called “metaphorai”. So one takes a “metaphor” to go to work. The city is like a language with its own syntax, stylistic devices, and “rhetoric of walking”. Through their works, the artists presented in the exhibition “Urban Metaphors” give rise to objects and images that document and reconstruct the city’s narrative function. Thus they all produce stories about Brussels, revealing its metaphorical dimension and metamorphic power.
Heterogeneous and unsettled, the city favors all sorts of metamorphoses. “The form a city takes more quickly shifts, alas, than does the mortal heart” Baudelaire tells us in his Parisian Scenes. The photographer’s lens captures fragments of an urban space under perpetual alteration, catalyzing stories and legends waiting to be revived.
Metaphorai is part of the 2018 Plein Soleil, l’été des centres d’art contemporain, the Summer of contemporary art centers coordinated by d.c.a / French association for development of art centers.