STAYIN’ ALIVE. Discover the collections.

Group Show 18.02.2023 – 23.04. 2023

BPS22, Musée d’art de la Province de Hainaut

Cur: Pierre-Olivier Rollin

With almost a century separating them, what could possibly connect two dandies as antithetical as Paul Valéry (1871-1945) and Yves Adrien (1951)? Answer: A shared aversion to museums, which they viewed as necropolises!

For the first, a scholar who could turn his hand to anything and an example of the ‘national intellectual hero’ during the inter- war period, museums were reminiscent

of the temple and the salon, the cemetery and the school… “Only a civilisation neither sensual nor reasonable could have built this house of incoherence. Who knows what nonsense results from gathering together all these dead visions. They envy each other and fight for the contemplation to which they owe their existence.” he wrote in 1923 in Le Problème des musées. For the second, a rock critic, writer, punk and post-punk theoretician, the issue is beyond any doubt: “Is museum the deadest word in the language? Yes.» So, in a museum, art is nothing more than dismal (NovöVision. Les Confessions d’un cobaye du siècle, 1980).

The complete opposite to these deathly ideas, Stayin’ Alive. Discover the Collections invites you to discover some forty works by Belgian and international artists, most of them recently added to the collections, and share their vitality and driving force. Through the paintings, installations, photographs, drawings and videos chiefly produced

over the past ten years and for the most part never before shown, the exhibition consolidates the idea that the museum is

an essential place for energising art and sharing it with as many people as possible.

Stayin’ Alive presents a dynamic, vibrant overview of the collections centred on society’s most current issues. The title refers to the disco where Saturday night fever only serves to put aside dismay and disenchantment. Behind their sometimes poetic, falsely festive or tragic aspects, the artworks on show always address the distinguishing issues of our times.

One example is the works of the Luxembourg artist Filip Markiewicz (1980) located at the centre of the exhibition. A karaoke inviting the visitor to vocalise songs (Fake protest songs karaoke, 2016, acquired in 2016) that have the potential to reveal a protester, depending on the context of the presentation. Facing this installation is a work in graphite by the same artist (Europa macht frei, 2015, acquired in 2016). It shows an imaginary bank note with the body of Aylan Kurdi, the Kurdish child found on a Turkish beach on 2 September 2015, at the centre.

Conceived as a series of small, formal, narrative or semantic segments, the exhibition encourages relationships between the artworks; they respond to each other, enhancing their shared co-existence and unfurling their potentialities depending on the proposed groupings.