Trip to Antwerp with studio visit Nadia Naveau

09:45

Departure at S.M.A.K.

11:00 – 12:00

Studio visit Nadia Naveau.

Nadia Naveau (b. 1975, Bruges) lives and works in Antwerp and Saint-Bonnet-Tronçais. In her oeuvre, sculptor Nadia Naveau experiments with forms, materials and use of colour. She is always on the move. For her sculptures, she draws inspiration from different contexts and kneads them together into a strange, idiosyncratic iconography.

Naveau creates both life-size and very small sculptures, usually modelling them out of clay. She then realises a sculpture in a wide variety of materials: plaster, ceramic, polyester, concrete, or plasticine.

In her oeuvre, Nadia Naveau seamlessly unites forms and iconography of antiquity with those of our contemporary society. Anything can be a source of inspiration. Each sculpture has its own story. She impressively plays off material, use of colour and formal language. She explores and mixes the boundaries between the figurative and the abstract, the baroque and the stylised, the contemporary and the classical in her works.

Naveau's sculptures never consist of a single form, they are always composed (in forms and/or materials), multiform.

14:00 – 15:00

Guided tour by artist/curator Grace Ndiritu in the exhibition Grace Ndiritu Rreimagines the FOMU Collection

In the exhibition, British-Kenyan artist Grace Ndiritu puts together a new photographic universe in which she integrates painting, textiles and interior design, inspired by female artists O'Keeffe, Modotti and Albers. It is a radical and holistic reinterpretation of the classic collection exhibition.

In her art practice, Ndiritu explores our rapidly changing world. She sees shamanism as a way to revive 'the dying art museum'. With this exhibition, Grace Ndiritu creates a haven, a place to slow down and reflect. She invites you to look with an open mind, make intuitive connections and leave rational thinking behind. Ndiritu is interested in architecture as a kind of 'spiritual technology'. She has designed a wooden scenography inspired by mid-20th-century Californian houses, modernist museum interiors and major international trade fairs.

Ndiritu's photographic installation A Quest For Meaning: Painting as a Medium of Photography (2014) is the starting point of her quest through the FOMU collection and the resulting exhibition. Ndiritu associatively combines photographs and coloured walls. Through surprising combinations, she gives new meanings to works by Alexandre, Bianca Baldi, Samuel Bourne, Dirk Braeckman, Alvin Langdon Coburn, Lynne Cohen, Gilbert Fastenaekens, Gertrude Fehr, Geert Goiris, Willy Kessels, Rinko Kawauchi, Man Ray, Auguste Salzmann, Filip Tas, Nadine Tasseel and Wolfgang Tillmans, among others.  

The design of Ndiritu's exhibition also integrates the Emperor's Panorama, a masterpiece from the FOMU collection that is back on public display after a thorough restoration. Created in 1905, it was then a modern machine, an 'automaton', intended to bring a photographic spectacle in 3D to a mass audience. The stools surrounding the viewing box can seat 25 people at a time to enjoy the magic of three-dimensional images.