Besides having a book-shop, Onomatopee will represent both the Diagrams of Power show, on show throughout the entire exhibition space during Art Brussels, and the reprint of the Atlas of Agendas book by Bureau d'Etudes.

The 6th edition of POPPOSITIONS took place from 20 to 23 April 2017 at ING Art Center. The building is located right at the heart of Brussels’ museum quarter on Place Royale, opposite from Royal Fine Art Museum, Magritte Museum and BOZAR, at a walking distance from the Sablon neighbourhood.

​Onomatopee served as bookshop

This year’s jury consisted of artist Kasper Bosmans, artist and curator Jo-ey Tang and curator Elise Lammer with the support of Niekolaas Johannes Lekkerkerk (The Office for Curating, NL), who has been appointed as artistic director. With the leitmotiv of "Don’t Agonize, Organize" as a leading principle, the jury has sought for proposals that steer and reinvent the political imagination by proposing diverse forms of political opposition that are rich in alternatives, concrete in propositions, and delivered through everyday projects. On this premise, the jury has selected 21 project spaces, artist initiatives and galleries that re-envision what it means to be grounded, accountable and active as part of a community with shared hopes and aspirations.

Resistant Experiences

A rebirth of form and colors’ relational capacity

Full of experience, we can modestly stand up through joy and reach beyond today’s pessimism. The Experience Economy might have defined the cultural parameters that lead up to the crisis, as they failed to stimulate an awareness of what this economy's saturation might lead up to. We can either destroy or ignore this saturation’s façade, or we become resistant because of our relation with those experiences.

Both Yasser Ballemans and Esther Tielemans do so modestly and elegantly. Utilizing modernist attitudes (Ballemans) or modernist techniques (Tielemans) they not only relate to the heritage that generated a post-colonial façade of western wellbeing, but reposition with newly found integrity.

Inspired by intuition and forms, Ballemans activates his audience in practice. As described in the Manifestation publication, his works are a lively theatre where masks appear within or next to the crowd. It is a sociability of playfulness. Meanwhile Tielemans situates her work as a scene, as a decor, in which abstracts become present and allow us to mirror our shade's physics.

The edginess of this work is caused by naïve but politically neutral positions of forms and colors; a modern legacy that simultaneously frames the artistic play in basis. As such this play is primal, is conduced via amateurish therefore recognizable effectiveness that appeals to our gut senses. Professionally processing this sensibility and in expanding upon the capacities of the modernist age as it enters the realms of contemporary culture’s vulnerabilities, these works generously allow us to execute the integrity of artistic play in a doubtful era. Experience calling for contemplation.

artists: Esther Tielemans, Yasser Ballemans
loans from: sundaymorning@ekwc, Gallerie Akinci