Home

Arts

Sweet bees are made of these

First album from Quasiland is filled with sparkling pop songs in Dutch

On their eponymously titled debut album, Quasiland alternate groovy, brisk pop songs with more subdued tunes. Most of the seven members play different instruments: guitar, bass, drums, keyboards and trumpet are prominent in the mix. The album just came out this spring, but Quasiland started in the summer of 2009 in the town of Tienen, Flemish Brabant.

“I had been asked to play a solo concert, but I wasn’t keen to perform alone,” explains lyricist and lead singer Wannes Deboes. “So I asked some extra musicians to join me. It wasn’t yet the line-up we have now, but I consider it the beginning of Quasiland.”

Christophe Verbiest
(May 22, 2013)

An open book

The Wonderkamer shows us what drives contemporary children’s authors and illustrators

The Literary Museum in Hasselt, which focuses mainly on children’s literature and illustration, has recently reinvented one of its permanent exhibitions, a room filled with little cabinets full of objects that selected authors hold dear. After some redesigning, and the addition of several new artefacts and authors, the entire room has been revamped and named the Wonderkamer (the Wonder Room).

The Wonderkamer contains 18 wooden cabinets in which children’s authors and illustrators such as René Swartenbroekx, Bettie Elias, Lieve Baeten and Kolet Janseen were able to show what inspires and motivates them, as well as some personal titbits that are essential to their way of writing.

Rebecca Benoot
(May 15, 2013)

The forgotten generation

An exhibition in Ghent revisits overlooked figures in local modern art history

Shedding new light on the Belgian art scene from around 1920 – that’s the ambitious goal of Modernism: Belgian Abstract Art and Europe at the Museum of Fine Arts in Ghent. And we can safely say: Mission accomplished.

When speaking about Belgian art at the beginning of the 20th century, the focus often lies on the Flemish expressionists (Constant Permeke, Gustave De Smet), a symbolist like Valerius De Saedeleer or fauvist Rik Wouters. They all worked within the figurative tradition, but the national avantgarde art of the time also fostered a bunch of abstract painters.

Unlike their figurative colleagues, they were not cherished at the time. And with a few exceptions, there has been no real revaluation since.

Christophe Verbiest
(May 8, 2013)

A revolutionary spirit

Flemish director Anja Daelemans makes film history in a co-production with North Korea

There is a saying in Korean: Over the mountains are mountains. Essentially, one hardship follows another. As proverbs go, it’s not exactly plucky. But when it comes to co-operating with a country like North Korea, it’s most definitely apt. This is why the movie Comrade Kim Goes Flying is so remarkable. Not only is it being released worldwide – nearly unheard of for a film shot in North Korea – but it is the very first feature film made within the borders of the infamous dictatorship with an entirely local cast in co-production with the west.

Flemish director Anja Daelemans made the film with British director Nicholas Bonner and North Korean director Kim Gwang Hun. Daelemans, the producer of two Oscar-nominated shorts, ran into Bonner at a film festival in 2006. Over “a little too much whisky,” she says, they hatched the idea of making a feature film in North Korea. (The only other westerner to have that distinction was an Italian director of exploitation films in the 1980s, who brought in several Italian actors.)

Lisa Bradshaw
(May 1, 2013)

Images as ammunition

Antwerp’s FotoMuseum shows Gaddafi archive and Arabic artists responding to dictatorship

Photography has the power to make and break regimes. That is at the heart of the striking exhibition Power! Photos! Freedom!, part Gaddafi archive, part activism via camera in the Arab world.

In the Arab world, the power of the image has often been misused as propaganda by dictators. With the help of a camera and the internet, local artists and activists are using the same images to their advantage, throwing them like a boomerang in the faces of the leaders they used to fear.

Tom Peeters
(April 24, 2013)

At home in the rest of the world

Ostend’s Mu.Zee hosts an exhibition of 30 years in the life of Antwerp artist Philip Aguirre y Otegui

Being a person who feels most comfortable with linear narratives, I felt a little lost in the Philip Aguirre y Otegui exhibition in Ostend’s Mu.Zee museum. At least at first. But once you let go of wanting to see a story build from the 1980s to today, you realise how delightful each work is in its own right, regardless of when or why the Antwerp artist created it.

That was the goal of Aguirre, who curated the show himself. “We decided not to make it a historical, retrospective kind of show because I thought I was too young for that,” the 52-year-old tells me from his home in the Borgerhout district of Antwerp. “Instead of chronological or thematic, it’s more like a poetic landscape. Every visitor can make their own story from it.”

Lisa Bradshaw
(April 17, 2013)

Death and the singer

Ozark Henry’s latest album opens up a new road with an old collaborator

Ozark Henry is the stage name of Kortrijk-born Piet Goddaer, who broke through to an international audience in 2001 with his third album, Birthmarks, a collection of pop songs streaked with classical music and electronics. The classical influence was less present on his next albums, though still palpable. His sixth and latest album, Stay Gold, is first and foremost a collection of affectionate pop tunes.

The most remarkable difference between Stay Gold and Ozark Henry’s previous outings is the presence of second singer Amaryllis Uitterlinden. In the past, Goddaer has regularly added an extra voice to his songs. This time around, it’s different. “Some of the new songs gravitated towards duets. For that I didn’t just need a good singer, but someone whose voice fits with mine. Compare it with a film: It’s not enough to have two great actors; there needs to be chemistry between them.”

Christophe Verbiest
(April 10, 2013)

Golden oldies

Antwerp’s Rockox House is dressed up with paintings to look like it did in the 17th century

An exquisite selection from the collection of Antwerp’s Fine Arts Museum has found temporary shelter in the mansion of Nicolaas Rockox, a mayor of Antwerp in the 17th century. Het Gulden Cabinet (The Golden Cabinet) aims to evoke the atmosphere of the kunstkabinetten of the era – the precursors to today’s museums – and will run until the Fine Arts Museum reopens in 2017.

Nicolaas Rockox lived in turbulent times. He was a scion of a family of urban nobility – referred to as the Nobles of the Gown as opposed to the “real” nobility known as the Nobles of the Sword – that had served the thriving city of Antwerp for decades.

Marcel Schoeters
(April 3, 2013)

Building character

Socialism meets architecture in the 20th-century work of the Brunfaut family
Fernand Brunfaut’s building that housed the old socialist newspaper Vooruit

Between the 1920s and 1960s, the Brunfaut family of architects designed some of Belgium’s best-known buildings. Some of them are famous for their usefulness and longevity, such as Brussels Airport, and some for their years of abandonment and neglect.

Chances are you’ve never really thought about the origins of Brussels’ Central Station, as you rush through on your way home. The terminal of Brussels Airport in Zaventem is another building that is taken for granted as travellers pass through its doors; it serves its purpose, and we don’t think any more about it.

Karen McHugh
(March 27, 2013)

When bigger is better

Ostend’s new Grote Post is the culture boost the city has been waiting for

Don’t be fooled by the name: Ostend’s De Grote Post is not a post office; it is a culture centre. But it used to be a post office, and the now-vast space, which began staging performances three months ago, has kept the atmosphere of the protected post-war building intact.

You would be forgiven for missing the opening of De Grote Post, Ostend’s new culture centre. Though it’s been in the press for a couple of years, mostly with an air of relief that the building, which has stood empty since 1999, would finally be put to good use, it began staging events quietly, with invitation-only performances by Tom Lanoye and Wouter Deprez last December.

Lisa Bradshaw
(March 20, 2013)