Guillaume Bijl

Since the end of the 70s Guillaume Bijl has explored the boundaries separating art and reality. Mostly, he wrenches banal elements out of everyday reality and transports them to an unexpected location. ln this way the artist has transformed various museums, galleries and cultural centres into a travel agency, supermarket, atomic shelter, military information centre, mattress land, an eastern carpet shop, marriage bureau or set for a TV quiz.
S.M.A.K. is giving Bijl the opportunity to take the whole museum in hand and display a sort of amalgam of various interventions. Previously his work often appeared as fragmentary interventions at Biennales and other art manifestations. For the first time S.M.A.K. will bring together a large number of his transformation-installations (integrated in a large new realisation), the cultural-tourist museums and a series of 'Sorry's' in an exhibition with a retrospective character. ln general we can put that Bijl visualises the 'Archaeology of our Civilization Now'.