Nine and a Half Weeks project was an attempt to push the gallery to live outside the usual openings. Each day was an opening, a residence, a workshop, an event or a meeting. The function of the gallery itself was widely surpassed by practices that were outside the assigned frame. Permanent Vacation lays the foundations of another experiment within the «gallery» device by taking the exact opposite direction. It is an experimental process of the most basic. To the continual chain and profusion of short-lived proposals answers a handful of permanent works which will silently accompany the gallery over the upcoming years. Modestly, it is a matter of questioning this obsolete tool that does not hold any more the same place in the art market (supplanted, among others, by art fairs) and that is having hard time now in competing with the sharpest curatorial proposals.
With Permanent Vacation, ELP proposes an exhibition which will take sense with time, when, during upcoming hangings, the artists will dialogue with a place which is not neutral any more, but has become a text full of meanings. The future exhibitions will thus take place in this discreet and peripheral layout. Paradoxically, in this hollow display, the seven proposals will have the space and furthermore all the time needed to expand.
The works presented this evening will be indicated afterwards systematically in parallel to the other exhibitions, as well on the website as in further communications etc. …
For the opening of this project, guests Ivo Provoost and Simona Denicolai will introduce galerie Edla, an immaterial gallery project. However different it might be, this proposal is based on the same questionings: what other gallery is possible? What is the current relevance of this device?

2nd International Antakya Biennial 2010 (Antakya, Turkey) in Sofia
The Biennial is curated by Dessislava Dimova and Arzu Yayintas and opens in Antakya in Ocotber 2010. Its concept uses the notion of structure as a metaphor to explore the way our collective life is organized today and the role of artists for creating new forms of social organization. Besides working locally in Antakya and the region, the Biennial also expands internationally and collaborates with different partner countries. In 2010 these are Belgium, The Netherlands and Bulgaria. The parallel events of the Biennial begin in May with the video screening in The Red House in Sofia and continue with a series of talks and exhibitions in Brussels in June and July. The screenings are to be presented by Dessislava Dimova.

PLATEAUX is an international production festival for young artists in the field of experimental theatre, performance and live-art. Initiated by KÜNSTLERHAUS MOUSONTURM and co-produced by DEUTSCHE BANK STIFTUNG, the festival aims to promote new experimental forms of performance by providing them with a professional platform. PLATEAUX FESTIVAL produces once a year up to seven new productions to be premiered in the 10 days festival in April.

I like translations, linguistic translations but also, in a more spatial physical or metaphorical sense, translations understood as the subtle, deliberate movement, of a being, a body, an icon, a practice, discipline, an area of knowledge or a concept which, through it’s very displacement, opens up new and freer areas of investigation, research, transmission and perception.
Litterally, translation is something that brings you beyond the usual environment: /trans- fero./
Originally used to designate a given mathematical movement, translations convey metaphorically the ideas of displacement, of a subtle shift in norms and codes, through the change of perspective and the sensible apprehension of a genuinely enriching diversity of approaches. Translations provide both the creator, the mediator and the observer with a glimpse into interstitial horizons.

In this globalized world of ours, and in this even more globalised art world of ours, it is the increasingly essential, seminal privilege of the artists to live, physically and intellectually, the art of translating themselves, their work and their investigations.From one perspective to the other, from one field/area of knowledge to the other. Of course, there is also an inevitable internal translation in the very progressive processual and self-reflexive approach often favoured in contemporary creation. Beyond, in a post-modern approach, artists are free to use the formal language of their choice to express and articulate a message and to communicate to an audience. For they have indeed the privilege to be allowed to switch languages and to assume the position of the /fou du roi/, that of the free /Logos/, independent from the restrictive dictatorship of scientific and technological specialization.

This show is to be apprehended as the first chapter / paragraph of an additive and global curatorial project: it will be integrated in a series of experiments, which will further develop, in different contexts and formats, the variety of apprehensions of the concept. It found its quite litteral point of development in the translation of the curator, invited to be a visiting lecturer in a well-known post-graduate diploma in Gent. The counterpart is now the invitation made to these Gent-based artists to develop their own variations of the theme in the temporarily self-reconverted Brussels gallery space of Elaine Levy Project.