Aline Bouvy: Heavy Fuckry / I don’t need you to feed me

Aline Bouvy’s multidisciplinary practice is a way of expressing her refusal to compromise and adapt to systems in our society which aim to regulate our longing, conforming it to the norms and values which shape that same society. Bouvy questions and denounces how the images we have of ourselves and of humanity are determined by this morality. In this way, Bouvy is attracted to the non-conventional – not to fetishize elements from the margins of society, but from a wish to normalise what is considered out-of-bounds, and thereby adjusting the prevailing morality.

Bouvy questions how we handle contemporary cultural production and takes a stand against norms and values society imposes upon us. The work she made for Billboard Series — entitled Heavy Fuckry / I don’t need you to feed me — follows this disruptive way of thinking. Because it was commissioned for a billboard and is display literally within a context of advertising billboards — where an accepted but unrealistic view on humanity is displayed so eminently — Bouvy decided to subvert these advertisement strategies.

The accompanying one-day-exhibition ‘A Last Song for the Titanic Orchestra’ is a tribute to the musicians who continued playing during the sinking of the Titanic, cruising with joy towards an irrevocable end. As the music of the band almost served as their own mortal requiem, the pieces of the exhibition evoke one last dream before we die.

Somewhere between a sad celebration and a post-apocalyptic vision, this exhibition presents a group of artists who raise the question of our existential ecology. With works by Thomas Zipp, Aline Bouvy, Eva L’Hoest, Xavier Mary & Loup Sarion, Béla Pablo Janssen and Florance Giroud.

In addition to the exhibition, there will be a reading by Alberto García del Castillo, and a series of musical performances by Milan W. and Orrorin Daydream.

Coinciding with the inauguration of Aline Bouvy’s newest Billboard Series, we also invited Liège based Diesel project space to curate a special one-day-only exhibition behind the billboard, inside 019. Diesel Project Space is an alternative art space located in an abandoned gas station just off the E46 in Liège. They proposed to organize a salon exhibition, entitled ‘A Last Song for the Titanic Orchestra’.

This is the closing event of 019’s 2016 programmation. Join us for a last time this year for art, music, performance, video and drinks!

Curated by artlead / Thomas Caron
In collaboration with All Things Contemporary
Photo’s closing event: Aline Bouvy
Installation photography: Michiel De Cleene

Billboard Series is a long-term art project in public space, for which every three months an artist is invited to create a new, site-specific work for a 50 m2 billboard on Dok Noord, Ghent. Through changing presentations, Billboard Series wants to build a sustainable and productive dialogue with the surrounding neighbourhood and urban landscape, reflect on the changes that this neighbourhood is currently undergoing, and introduce a broad audience to different visual languages and ways of looking at the world.

Billboard Series is a project of artlead, together with the non-profit organizations artlead offline and 019. Billboard Series takes place within a scenography by architect Olivier Goethals, and is being developed with the support of the City of Ghent and the Flemish Community.