— Exhibitions
Céline Gillain Aquina

15 April – 21 May 2016

invitation Aquina2

Céline Gillain will inaugurate our video program in the dedicated film room of the gallery with her film Aquina

The starting point of Aquina is the emergence of the self-help smart phone applications. I personally use those apps frequently and they leave me confused, I’m not quite sure if I love or hate them. Their esoteric discourse seems either irresistibly right and terribly wrong at the same time.
I am disturbed by the gap between people’s questions and the advices the app feeds back at them. On one hand we have genuine existential interrogations such as : – How do I find my purpose? How do I make friends? How can I trust again? – and on the other hand, the response displays an excess of positivism – You are light, you are love, you are free to embrace the beauty of life. We find these self-persuasive recommendations everywhere.
It brings a lot of guilt in our lives because intrinsically we are not just “light and love”, we are also very obscure creatures carrying all sorts of wounds and burdens, and the stigma around it worsen our condition. Still, I wonder why I need to be helped or cheered up by my phone.
Our relations to each other through screen-devices is blurred. While self promotion rules, we find ourselves in a schizophrenic circle where we won’t be loved if we don’t shine, and thus not shining basically equals dying. Looking to create some suspense around it, Aquina relates to that contradiction : the strong desire to succeed and raise above and the absolute necessity to resist that self-desctructive drive.

Aquina
9’10 HD video 16 :9 format 2016

Céline Gillain is an artist based in Brussels. She has progressively developed a pluridisciplinary practice through video, performance and music, exploring their meeting points and their porosity. Her work questions our advertised lives and the happiness diktat that goes with it, challenging the heroic figure of the artist and the notions
of authorship. By trying to identify the ideological representation system of the dominant discourse, her work points out the existential gap between life on screen and life itself. Since 2010, she is part of The After Lucy Experiment, a women artists collective developping non hierarchical forms and practices in performance and installation. She’s also involved in art education, as a sociology of art professor in the ENSAV La Cambre in Brussels where she gradually developped an autonomy based pedagogy.

Preview 14 April 2016 from 6pm to 9pm