KOENRAAD DEDOBBELEER - RAYMOND BARION - LAURE PROUVOST

Extra City presents three Artistic projects that look at 'the real' and its avatars, verisimilitude and artifice, proposing openended configurations of figures and grounds, actors and stages, movements, voices and Dei Ex Machina. 

Koenraad Dedobbeleer - The exhibition brings together new and existing works by Koenraad Dedobbeleer (b. 1975, Brussels), as well as works and reproductions of works by artists, designers or architects who have had a transformative role in the evolution of his practice. The installation outlines the composite image of an ‘allegory of sculpture’: a conversation, both palpable and abstract, about the recent history and aesthetic possibilities of this medium. Which specificities constitute contemporary sculpture, and what is the threshold between material intervention, functionality and aesthetic value? Always present in the Dedobbeleer’s work, these questions are brought to the fore and interwoven in an allegorical dialogue – a conversation between objects, documents and spectators, maquettes and actual spaces, modes of making and un-making.

Raymond Barion - Raymond Barion’s (b. 1946, Valkenburg) intriguing paintings employ an idiosyncratic inventory of spatial perspectives, constructive elements and critical propositions. His meticulous, floodlit, depopulated architectures, and his atmospherically-heavy interiors compose a particular history of seeing and being seen, of visibility and vulnerability: a history told without protagonists, but through threatening, uninhabitable spatial abstractions. In the ecstatic environments Barion paints, space itself appears to exercise free will, obstruct passageways and camouflage fissures, attract and repel to equal extents – finally to create an illusion of radiant, functional seamlessness. A transparent sheet of emptiness seems to cover Barion’s mechanized landscapes, holding the eye at a distance from topographies without entry or exit. Focusing on work made in ‘80s and ‘90s, and including a recently completed painting, the presentation highlights the relevance of Barion’s work to current debates on public space, multiplying social or political conflicts and the multiplying machines to document them visually.

Laure Prouvost - Film-maker and installation artist Laure Prouvost (b. 1978, Lille), winner of the 2013 Turner Prize, reimagines the configuration and function of Extra City’s cinema, creating a ‘dramaturgy’ of objects and images, moving or still, that disrupts the conventions of film screenings. The project foregrounds the artist’s interest in polymorphous narrative: stories told from different viewpoints, full of incident and reverie, incorporating errors and non-sequiturs, forgetting and improvisation. The first stage in the project is a scenography for two recent films: ‘Wantee’ (2013) and ‘Grand Ma’s Dreams’ (2013), recounting the convoluted story of the artist’s grandparents.