The exhibitions Urgent Conversations: Athens–Antwerp and Urgent Conversations: Antwerp – Athens are a collaboration between EMST and M HKA, a theoretical and visual dialogue, based on works from the collections of both museums, which includes more than 70 works structured in 22 topics.   

28.04.2017 - 07.01.2018        

M HKA, Museum van Hedendaagse Kunst Antwerpen - Leuvenstraat 32, 2000 Antwerpen

EMST, National Museum of Contemporary Art - Kallirrois Avenue & Amvr. Frantzi Str., Athens 11743

Guillaume Bijl

(c)image: Ulli Lindmayr
Neuer Supermarkt, 1990
Poster , 81 x 71.5 cm
ink, paper

'I show my time. I make sets in such a way that reality, for a moment, can also be seen as a set." 

Guillaume Bijl believes in the artist that interferes in the world and that enhances understanding of this world. He looks attentively at the world and he makes a move (when he turns an art-gallery into a car-driving school), he makes a shift which enhances our understanding by enhancing our perception. Guillaume Bijl is bloody serious even realistic; he is alienating us by the ordinary; making gestures in the ordinary and alienation us from the ordinary by making it more ordinary; withholding the specific micro-meaning. Making the ordinary even more ordinary as in naturalist enterprise. It is sustainable because he beliefs it, it works. It’s about suppressing everything that can make the banal less banal. All of his works are about making a move, a factual gesture which stays in banality, complete immanence. Was there a relationship with Marcel Broodthaers? Broodthaers is more about the possibility of transcendence by poetics and mourning the loss of magic. The works of Guillaume Bijl are more naturalist descriptive enterprises.