DENIS MAKSIMOV

“I am trying to bring together invisible borders”

Published in The Brussels Times Magazine (September 2019)

Diana Campbell Betancourt has chosen Brussels as her base for many reasons. “It is not really an art world center”, she highlights. But it is a meeting point in terms of flights, trains and at the same time an ideal calm place to retreat yourself from seasonally swarming places like Basel and Venice or constantly hectic Paris and London. Brussels is a place for thinking and processing.

She is convinced that art can make a difference in places beyond those familiar names, which had become the attractor points for the art world tourists. She is a chief curator and initiator of Dhaka Art Summit, “an international, non-commercial research and exhibition platform for art and architecture related to South Asia”. The Summit’s core focus is on Bangladesh. It was founded in 2012 by the Samdani Art Foundation—which continues to produce the festival—in collaboration with the Ministry of Cultural Affairs, People’s Republic of Bangladesh. The Summit also has the support from the Getty Foundation’s Connecting Art Histories initiative. DAS is hosted every two years at the Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy.

Denis (D): You work mostly with so-called MENASA (the Middle East, North Africa and South Asia) region - geopolitically defined area.

Diana (DI): Kind of, although the problem with ‘MENASA’ is that Islam will be the overarching header within which to frame Bangladesh. But we are much more interested in this kind of ‘global majority’ dialogue in this edition of the Summit. In the previous edition, we looked at Bangladesh as being the cross-section between South and Southeast Asia. India dominates South Asia discussion, while Singapore dominates the Southeast Asia discussion - so the two don’t meet yet. But if you look at indigenous cultures weaving South and Southeast Asia there are tonnes of connections - so it is absolutely essential that these two meet. These are the stories that are talked about in one of the shows that was commissioned for the last Summit, which was curated by Cosmin [Costinas] from Para Site [independent art space in Hong Kong] and the show traveled from us in Bangladesh to Hong Kong, from there to the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw and so on.

D: Is it your intention to critically redraw this geopolitical mapping?

DI: Absolutely. For instance, Bangladesh and Thailand are in fact much more connected than Bangladesh and India, for example, you can’t get a direct flight from Delhi to Dhaka, so traveling gets expensive, for Bangladeshis getting visa to India is really complicated. And there are tonnes of daily flights to Bangkok. So the perception that India and Bangladesh must be very close in the current geopolitical climate is actually wrong. Then you can look at other lines of connection - like copper trade and so on.

D: Do you plan to expand beyond Bangladesh in the spirit of “global majority”?

DI: Yes, absolutely, that’s why I just spent a month in South America, and I speak Spanish and Portuguese, so I was able to draw these connections. The whole art world is operating in English and this is the biggest critique of myself. I like the idea of the epicentre - because it can erupt anywhere, right?

D: Indeed. Speaking of the topic of the next Summit in Dhaka - “Seismic Movements” - could you name three top political seismic shifts of nowness you’d consider the most important?

DI: Personally, I would say that an agency for women is a seismic shift that needs to happen. Obviously, we’ve seen the #MeToo movement, but there are move shifts that need to happen in this direction.

Then it is the power of an assembly to instigate change. I am super impressed by what I am seeing in Hong Kong right now - it is one of the largest protests ever in the region.

Then racism is a huge problem. The way that I construct my team is diverse in terms of gender, race, class, and language. What is interesting in the context of Dhaka is that there is nothing in terms of the Western style of art structures - so I can build what I want to see, almost leading by example.

D: How do you safeguard from possible attempts of censorship or possible tensions that can arise in programming the Summit?

DI: The government is not involved at all in the contents of the Summit. Basically, the give us the building, which is a lot as without it we couldn’t do this. The thing we try to do with the summit is to keep it purposely messy. There are over 300 artists shown and it is not about being the best, excellence, etc - it is something I really try to fight against.

Dhaka Art Summit “Seismic Movements” will take place in February 7-15, which full program being an announcement in September.

Queer as Agency in Contemporary Art

Denis Maksimov in conversation with Katarzyna Perlak for Arts Territory

‘Niolam Je Se Kochaneczke’ Video still (2016)

Katarzyna Perlak is a queer artist, filmmaker and educator, operating in the multimedia space of contemporary art and visual culture. Her work is embedded in ethos of the critical theory of social and political violence of the institutional power of normalisation, standardisation and oppression. She produces performances, video, photography, collage, textiles and is constantly experimenting with the new media of expression (www.katarzynaperlak.com).

Denis Maksimov (DM): Let’s start from your video ‘Niolam Je Se Kochaneczke’ (2016). Is it a title of a particular folk song?

Katarzyna Perlak (KP): The title is inspired by a folk song but it wasn’t the title itself, but part of the lyrics.

DM: Was it your intention to redefine the cultural heritage in the direction of queering its nature in the video?

KP: There are several layers to that. I had the idea for this film for quite a while; intentions for making it came for the most part from my lived experiences.

When I lived in Poland I participated in folk singing workshops and listened to EE folk, so I do connect to this music on a sentimental level, I always liked it. There are a lot of love songs, but they (not surprisingly) always represent heteronormative narratives. Queer love wasn’t represented, but definitely, it was present. Here came my idea of creating the archive that couldn’t be there. I wanted to reclaim these stories, if I may say so.

Secondly, it was important to have the conversation about how history and tradition is used - both in Poland and outside, in migrant communities - for nationalistic purposes. For example, images of folk craft are often used by Polish Diaspora Institutions, presenting this image of Eastern European heritage as a sort of culturally simplified entertainment with the focus on what the local public would immediately connect with. My goal is to complicate it and include multiply narratives that populate this heritage.

DM: It is the agency of ‘orientalisation’ (in Edward Said terminology) of this tradition, isn’t it? The gaze of trying to catch something unusual, sort of touristic form of catching the essence of something.

KP: I recently went for a research trip to the Ethnographic Museum in Krakow, and while there I had quite a few conversations about representation of folk traditions. There is a certain, very important social class problematic to it. The traditional folk songs were at times not ‘poetic’ or ‘sophisticated’ enough (or too obscene) for the people who collected and archived them, so at times they censored or modified them. The collectors of the ethnography were mostly coming from the upper class, therefore they were appropriating this heritage in a very specific way.  They were trying to change the songs as they were trying to make them more usable for upper-middle-class context.

DM: They were trying to colonise this ‘rural’ experience to something they can understand and use in their ‘oriental’ perspective on the rural life, making a product of entertainment out if it.

KP: Not sure colonised applies here but appropriated them for sure. During the Communist period, there was an operation of adaptation of what was considered ‘low’ culture to ‘high’ places like palaces of culture, where the folk songs were performed for the party nomenclature and city audience. That is brilliantly presented in recent Pawlikowski’s ‘Cold War’ movie.  It is interesting for me to register how this folk tradition interpretation is moving around depending on the particular ‘government of the day’ agenda.

In the video, I worked with folk singers from various backgrounds, I wanted to add the narrative of migration there as an inherent part of the whole picture, as well as raise polemics about Eastern European identity being majorly associated with whiteness while the reality of it is becoming multi-cultural and multi-ethnical.

I want to place queer relationships in the space of Eastern European history. Because even if it is unregistered, it had definitely had been there. For that reason, I have started to create the fictional archive of the folk songs.

My migrant experience has been also an important factor here. A need to self - define, free from both Western stereotypes and Eastern nationalistic absorptions. Since I have been living in the UK it became quite urgent and necessary.

DM: Where would you prefer to see this work presented? In contemporary art or folk art museum?

KP: I have mostly presented it in galleries and film festivals (in Western Europe); I would like it to be shown in an ethnographic museum in Poland though, as a fictional museum collection. Yet I wouldn’t want to make a choice between the two, because the audience can have a different experience of work depending on the context. But the impact for a wider public would definitely be more challenging in an ethnographic museum when the audience would be taken by surprise.

DM: Would you find it problematic to show this work simultaneously in both of the institutions of contemporary art and folk art for instance?

KP: In a way, creating this fictional art museum is an operation of thinking on a specific hypothetical level. For me presenting this work in an art gallery (in Poland) is already complicated, a museum seems like almost an impossible option. So it seems that breaking those walls in any form is a definite ‘win’. The spaces where I am so far invited to show it in Eastern Europe are specifically LGBTQ+ friendly, while I would be interested in exposing the work to the wider, “unprepared” audience.

Here in the UK, this border between ‘queer-friendly’ and something else is more subtle, while in Eastern Europe the struggle for visibility is still ongoing. I wouldn’t want the work, in general, to be only shown in a special “tolerant space”. I would like to reach out into further layers of the culture, to the audiences that would be surprised to see it. It certainly doesn’t decrease the importance of showing this work in specifically LGBTQ+ contexts of course, but seeing what’s happening politically around the world I think it is important to go out wider and avoid caving in.

DM: The language and references, I think, is extremely important in a conversation like ours. There is no outside-text, as Derrida was indicating. How do you define the difference between queerness, LGBTQ+ and ’same-sex love’ in your lexicon?

KP: I tend to switch between them depending of the context. I wouldn’t like to pour or to impose an identity on anyone while making work that relates to subjects whose experiences or identities might reflect in any of those terms, so in this way, it is also the question of openness. In my films, it is mostly women presenting subjects, but I don’t want to exclude any other queer identities from there of course so ‘queer’ opens up the narratives, particularly that in all the works main subjects have their faces covered, so gender can’t be easily assumed. Looping to another project, in  ‘Happily Ever After’ (2017) the performers that are walking on the streets of Wroclaw have masks on them. Although they wore dresses, it wasn’t totally defined if they are female. This ambiguity is important.

DM: It is more about the strategy of communication of the message. The words are working as a toolkit. The clearness of the message is important.

KP: Yes, we also need to take into account what is lost in translation, or not even translated. In Polish ‘queer’ as term and identity only functions in English with no translation, similarly like gay, lesbian and ‘gender’. Which adds up to the idea that queerness is not part of Eastern European identity, but something that has been imported from Western countries.

I remember seeing once a Catholic poster in Poland on which was written: “Say NO to gender!”  The word “gender”, connected to feminist/queer studies was aligned with queerness so what they meant perhaps what ‘Say no to queerness’ – yet the actual message was not knowingly in support of throwing the gender binaries away, which was quite ironic.

DM: Did you have a specific goal when you developed the projects?

KP: My goal was to contribute to the conversation on the visibility of queer narratives and lives in the Eastern European context, present stories that are not being seen or talked about.

DM: By the way, returning to something you said before about your project - I don’t think your work is ‘fictionalising’ archives, as all the archives are fictional if you approach them in a critical way. It is always the gaze of the archiver that turns subjective into objective, fictional into the real. No one could say there were no songs that same-sex lovers wrote for one another, we just didn’t write them down as they were probably not considered to be worthy of being recorded. Do you think we should create nowadays new rituals, maybe inspired by the fact that we don’t have the memories of something from the past, in order to create the legitimisation for the future we want to live in?

KP: Many recognised and recorded rituals came from collective, communal experiences and efforts and in that way is interesting to think how new ones can become alive, formed and narrated through the current collective experiences. I like the idea of the invention of the rituals in everyday life, of its transformative potential.

Anyone can create them for the individual experiences and journeys we have every day, but if we talk about creating them through art practice when they go beyond our individual experience then perhaps there might be some problem with the authorship. If you make an artwork, the whole conversation about the legacy, artist-genius and so on is inevitably coming up. What would be the elements of it to call it legitimate?

DM: Can queer inclusivity counter the agony of the political? Can queer movement become the first political force to avoid ’the winner takes all’ logic and go beyond potentiality to become a new suppressor, something that the right wing are crying about as their largest fear?

KP: Well the right wing has many fears, yet they all come more or less to the fear of losing the privilege and power white patriarchal heteronormative subject have been accustomed to. No ‘inclusivity’ in conversation is going to change that and resistance is going be there to any real (or imaginary) change of the established power dynamics.

Not sure how can you really fight that – big question quite a few try to answer now - but putting the care for these feelings in centre of the movement (if that’s how we call it) would be rather counter-productive.

The notion of queerness has been always ever changing, evolving, and unsettled so in some way it makes sense that it has the potential of becoming quite abstract. Yet its roots are in very real everyday stories and experiences of violence that LGBTQ subjects have been exposed to (past and present). These need to be remembered and not forgotten in this abstraction. Queerness was and has been a tool, strategy, a part of nourishing structure helping those that others want to erase to survive, not a trending critical theory that helps one to contextualize their practice and dip in and out of it when convenient.

The queer movement has been challenging oppressive structures based on patriarchy and heteronormativity but it also included complications of race, class, gender - the politics there has definitely expanded beyond sexuality. The history of the movement is about trying to embrace more conversations and imaginations that are not yet there, bringing them into a space of social and political visibility. We have so many things we still have to open up and confront, so many other ways of living. Exposing it equally makes it more inclusive, but we have to be wary of it getting it appropriated into something else - because those acts can deprive it from political agency.

DM: Maybe we are actually not yet at that moment of political agency, but rather we need to first explore more of those differences in ways of living and then see how we can structure the conversation? Maybe we are not there yet for the comprehensive politics?

KP: I would reply here with a quote from J.E. Munoz’s Cruising Utopia: Queerness is not yet here. Queerness is an ideality. Put another way, we are not yet queer. We may never touch queerness, but we can feel it as the warm illumination of a horizon imbued with potentiality. We have never been queer, yet queerness exists for us as an ideality that can be distilled from the past and used to imagine the future. The future is queerness’s domain.    So yes we might not be there but we have to keep on going and trying as we are.

DM: Is it possible to escape the incorporation of the struggle by the market? Can we resist it?

KP: There is no easy answer. The political struggle becomes capitalised on all the time, and while the goals are not there yet and core establishment remains the same we are witnessing ‘moving on to the next thing’ as new trending concept etc arrives. These concerns are present and circulating, once an artist I am in conversation with said that queerness has to be weaponised again, which was a great way to put it.

What it could mean? The term queer was appropriated from something that was an insult. The resistance was to wear it with pride. But now it has been in some way ‘normalised’, and in it lost some of its radical agency. People before would have been disturbed by what it was associated with. Certainly many people still are. Maybe we should bring this element back, in a sense of keeping the uncomfortable, uneasy element in – in whatever context and conversations that un-comfort is needed.

DM: What do you think about the current right-wing movements, who try to use resistance to growing acceptance of the otherness as one of their core drives?

KP: Currently we see and hear things that not long time ago were unthinkable, both in language and in actions. It is driven by fear of losing the power/privilege and resistance to ‘political correctness’. I think we should speak more of political empathy than correctness; maybe this would change the way some engage with it. It is not about saying and doing things to present yourself as politically aware/correct (or however u call it), but truly feeling for those that have been and are discriminated upon and make a real change: personal, structural and institutional. What we are witnessing now is inauthenticity of correctness in the society that lacks in real empathy, with oppressive structures still being perpetuated.

DM: Do you see other ways of achieving visibility of the queerness beyond the art bubble, those special supporting spaces we talked about before?

KP: In my own experience, there is a great potential of achieving that through personal relationships, conversations and networks that have to be continuously built. I myself come from the working class background, which doesn’t have a direct connection with art or academia. Arts and theoretical discourses don’t reach working-class communities very often - even when arts try to be inclusive, it is still a bubble constructed by many forms of inaccessibility.  Perhaps one of the ways to open it up is to open the language through which arts communicate and through which that bubble is constructed.

DM: Should then queer storytelling attempt to focus on producing stories in new forms, using contemporary and maybe even aim for the future media?

KP: Good question. Art still has a communicative component in its centre, even if it is very cryptic. Maybe again it could be about looking at how you can go out of this bubble and what this medium/language would be. Some of the public realm works perhaps have been trying to break to be a reason for conversations on the streets. I use public space performances/interventions quite often in my work for this reason. Internet could be an example, providing wider access to a new political space. Maybe looking at our working processes and methodologies is one of the ways.

For example, I recently started working on an embroidery project and I estimated the work would take me many months to finish. I was thinking how it is counter-productive in a way. So if you do something very slow, against the currents of constant acceleration, it becomes in itself a mode of resistance. But the challenge here is in the necessity to co-exist within this real we have now and how can one survive if you resist in this space of totality, constantly demanding a particular form of behaviour?

Interview for “It’s an Artful Life”

“As co-founder of the Avenir Institute (www.avenirinstitute.info/) and having worked all around the world as a curator and analyst, Denis Maksimov has an incredibly deep perspective on the interchange of politics and art, as well as the intellectual impact of arts in daily life“. - Gillian Rhodes 

Listen the interview here. 

The Art of Sightseeing

Denis Maksimov. “The truth us a question of the standpoint”, business card for booking guided tour-performance, ‘The Game of Roles’ at ParisTexasAntwerp, June 2015.

Interview with curatorial team of Marres Currents #3 © by Denis Maksimov (DM) / originally published in The Brussels Times Magazine (December 2015 issue) and catalogue of Marres Currents #3 (in English and Dutch)

Marres Currents #3 was the third edition of the annual exhibition series titled Marres Currents. With this series, Marres, House for Contemporary Culture in Maastricht, presents recent graduates from art academies in the Southern Netherlands, Belgium and Germany. While offering emerging artists and curators a platform, Marres also aims to build an international infrastructure for talent development. Agata Jaworska was invited as guest curator for this year. Her exhibition In No Particular Order during the Dutch Design Week last year showed work of young designers. For Marres Currents #3, Jaworska gathered a team of curators around her. Ina Hollmann, Eva Jäger and Guillemette Legrand, (former) students of the Design Academy Eindhoven. Denis exhibited two conceptual artworks in this show and spoke with curators about their intentions and strategy.

DM: Why did you select these artists?

C: Sightseeing offers a series of probes and modes of inquiry into how to look at the world. We sought work that strove to understand what is happening in society, and manifested this through artistic practice. The participating artists manifest a multitude of ways of doing so - ranging from a simulated flight across the Earth to digging out a cubic metre of the ground. The works raise fundamental questions: how it is we come to get to know the world, and in this, what are the paradigms we take for granted. There is also a sense of adventure - from Fanny Hagmeier’s exhilarating experiments with her own body, to Stef van Dungen’s climbers that scale the Opel garage (painted white to evoke an icy mountain), and the installation by Jan van den Bosch that dares visitors to climb a scaffolding construction. Thrill, self-confrontation and risk are palpable. The works ask us to travel to unknown lands, to re-look at the past, to put ourselves in challenging positions, to question dominant ways of seeing, and through this, to inscribe our voices into the future history of the world.

DM: What role does story telling play?

C: There is a strong communicative aspect to the works. Darcey Bennett presents a story in the form of forensic evidence after the occurrence of an event. He deconstructs a tragedy, laying out all the evidence and asking us to piece it together. The message is fragmented and results in multiple inevitably incomplete versions. Struck by propagandistic accounts of national parks of Congo written during Belgian’s colonial rule, Alessandra Ghiringhelli embarked on her own investigation in the national archives. She presents her own account of history in a series of texts and illustrations. Well aware of the embedded bias of the author, she struggles with the impossibility of achieving objective representation.This exhibition is about embracing the instability of a journey - its narratives are not always proposing solutions or one immutable truth. The travel through Sightseeing is fragmented, sometimes incomplete and at other times confrontational. Visitors navigate between continents, virtual and physical experiences, past and future. They inevitably will compose their own version of the exhibition.

courtesy of Mikael Groc

DM: How did you approach the notion of ‘currents’?    

C: The present is a compilation; it co-exists with our knowledge of the past, our memories, our ideas of the future and our life plans. Working with this definition, we view Sightseeing as a snapshot of the present. Some works are speculative - for instance in Treasure Island, Skye Sun envisions an island tax haven populated by extinct species. It is an isolated land designed to attract the world’s wealthiest elite, where, as Skye says, “they can rebuild their world in the image of their investment”. Though these islands are fictional, their power to provoke relies on the fact that they offer a critique of present-day reality. Another work that simultaneously plays with the present and the future is The Dutch Mountain by Mirte van Duppen. Van Duppen makes a documentary of a mountain that could arise in the flat land of the Netherlands. She does this by filming real scenes in the country, fragments of reality that gradually build an image of the mountain in our minds. These visuals are augmented with interviews with experts on the topics of tourism, urbanism and nature. Their specialised comments on how to make and deal with such a mountain in this country ensure the viewer that this future fiction could just as easily be a present day reality. Skye and Van Duppen use different means to construct speculative geographies. The value of their scenarios lies not in their capacity to actually predict the future, but rather, to enable us to see ourselves in a clearer light today. They offer us a mirror of the here and now.

DM: You were asked to make an exhibition of selected graduation projects from art academies. Why did you bring in design and architecture?

C: The interesting thing in projects such as Skye Sun’s Treasure Island or Anja Kempa’s Remembering Spring is that the emphasis is not on the architectural design of the buildings, but rather on the narratives that they carry. These projects are ultimately about how buildings and their surroundings can manifest our hopes and fears about the future, and in a broader sense, how our material world ultimately fulfils a psychological and social function. People are working with narrative structures regardless of their formal training and discipline. We felt it was not only our role to convey what is happening at art academies but also what connections we could make to the works we encountered. This is not a discussion that is solely relevant to the art or design field. It is simply about being human and responding to the world.

DM: Could you give us a sense of the experience you aim to create for the show?

C: The first image that will confront the visitors is We weren’t lovers like that, and besides it would still be all right by Roel Neuraij. It is a photograph of a globe that he has rotated so that the location of where the photo was taken is touching the ground. Normally we orient ourselves in relation to where we are in the world, but this image asks us to consider how the world is positioned in relation to us. We hope this image sets the tone, introducing a bit of disorientation at the outset.Near the entry there is a film of Neuraij’s father, a physicist who takes us through an equation in order to calculate not our weight on the planet, but rather the force of the planet upon us. In Neuraij’s words: “The scientific method has been designed to discover rules and laws that operate beyond the human, but because we ourselves are inadvertently human, so is our science.” Neuraij studies the space between the Earth as an astronomical object and as it is understood by humans. The exhibition continues to present an inherently human experience of the world. Fanny Hagmeier subjects her body to extreme conditions, whether manmade or natural. Naked, she stands in a car wash, she swims next to a sea vessel, she lies on frozen ground, all in search of her bodily limits, and the sense of being alive through self-experimentation. She subjects her body to various conditions not unlike a scientist that is testing how one body reacts to various environments and forces.

One area of the exhibition brings together journeys from various places - Iceland, Iran, Congo, Russia, Japan and the Netherlands. These stories compile an incomplete atlas of the world. They accept the fact that subjectivity is an inevitable aspect of observation, measurement, analysis, description, and other methods used to understand and depict the world. The sense of experimentation and exploration continues throughout the exhibition both in the approaches of the artists and - we hope - in the state of mind of the viewer. Seeing something familiar with fresh eyes is one of the intentions of the show. The artists we selected have constructed practices that are largely about re-investigations. As a viewer, your investigation of the show (as a sight seer) will also be informed by a willingness to suspend disbelief and explore with fresh eyes.

Interview with Walter Vanhaerents

Walter Vanhaerents

The Vanhaerents Art Collection is a family collection of contemporary art containing works from the 1970s until today. It contains works from emerging young artists with those of more established artists by whom they were inspired. Belgian Art Collector Walter Vanhaerents manages and curates this vast collection of masterpieces.

Denis Maksimov: Do you have a strategy for collecting art? 

Walter Vanhaerents: There was never really any strategy. I just follow my heart. 

DM: Where did you spot the art you wanted to purchase? 

WV: I went to galleries as there were very few art fairs back when I started. There were just Art Cologne and Art Basel. There was no market - private collectors were kind of walking around. 

DM: How did you start to collect? 

WV: It was sort of a hobby. From an early age, I had to be very engaged in the family business. Later I started to look for something different to do in order to find a good balance in my life. Some people do sport for example. I found art collecting to be my “thing”. I was also very interested in architecture and that became a starting point. I started buying a number of pieces, without an investment perspective in mind. Creating a collection was not the purpose in the beginning. I was simply interested in artists who are making pieces that are larger than life. Life is three-dimensional and I wanted to surround myself with embodiments of this idea. I have always loved the medium of film. At the end of a film, I always forget what it was about because I focused so much on how it was directed and created. I was very interested in Warhol movies - many forget that he actually did his society portraits and prints in order to fund movie productions. They never made money themselves and the whole factory was a machine – generating revenue in order to fund film production. 

David Altmejd & Michelangelo Pistoletto works

DM: What is curation for you? 

WV: Due to my technical background, I feel very connected to installation works in open spaces. Placing a show together - that is curation for me. Who is a curator? Everyone can be a curator. There are too many curators, there is no curation standards. I am focused on visual sensations. I never did a curation elsewhere apart from my own space but I love to collaborate on the arrangement of my own collection with other curators. I like the idea of having two pieces next to each other in order to create a certain emotional tension. It is all about how you use the space. I think a lot of curators don’t understand the space enough. They don’t “feel” space well enough. Staying in the space, sitting in the corner there, understanding it - it’s very important for putting on the show. I also like to give the freedom of organising my space to external curators. It creates completely different perspectives on my collection. I don’t want to be a collector who is defined by a particular style. I like to show different facets of my interests and topics that are close to me.

DM: Where do you go to spot new talents? 

WV: I often go to East London in the younger galleries and I go to Paris. I develop a certain program for a trip and personally meet the people. It’s not possible to do that at an art fair. Fairs are just a way of presenting – and there is a lot of pressure. I never go into competition to buy. Once, at a fair in New York, a guy assured me that he gives me first reserve on a piece but then sold the piece before I came back at the agreed time, as he was afraid that I wouldn’t come back. Since then I told to myself that I won’t be doing purchases on fairs anymore. 

DM: How do you see contemporary art and the market now?

WV: There is so much choice in the market. I wouldn’t say there are any particular tendencies in contemporary art now. There is a lot of repetition which is definitely very common. It feels somehow muddy. It’s popular among the street artists for example. Sometimes works are so nihilistic. It’s just boring and it’s not new, these ideas were shown before. For me, it is important to try and find new perspectives and look for more depth. I decided initially that I will never go back in time with my collection. I am always looking for something new. Conceptual art is 60 years old - it’s not new anymore, but people still discuss it. It is not an interesting discussion anymore. DM: In the current climate of increasing cultural budget cuts, do you think private collectors can step in, in order to keep public institutions ‘contemporary’? WV: I am open to work together with museums concerning my collection. Stedelijk Museum in the Netherlands has already offered me a cooperation and I look forward to it. But here in Belgium it is difficult. Belgian museums don’t have funds to buy new art - their budgets are too small. At the same time, they don’t have good ideas about privatepublic collaborations yet. Sometimes I lend pieces from my collection, that’s all for now. DM: Do you think Jeff Koons and similar ‘celebrity artists’ still express something actual through their art? WV: That’s difficult to say - Koons is a lifetime career artist. He has said what he had to say. But you know - I thought Damien Hirst was a bubble, but I was wrong. The last pieces Koons made were clay, plasticine towers in Whitney. That is something he has never shown before. But James Ensor for example was drawing the same things after he turned 30. Murakami as well. I got several early sculptures of him for nothing and that’s it, I had no intention of buying more. Now he is still a hit, despite repetitiveness. 

published in The Brussels Times Magazine, February/March 2015