June 23 - August 12 2012

WANDERLUST is the title of a small but refined exhibition project, presenting five distinguished Belgian artist to the Korean audience at Artsonje Center; Francis Alÿs, Marcel Broodthaers, Honoré d’O, Joëlle Tuerlinck and Panamarenko.

‘Wanderlust’ is probably one of the most beautiful words in the German language and was originally closely related to a set of attitudes towards life and nature that were introduced by the artists of romanticism in the early 19th century. The word reveals an insatiable desire to leave conventions and securities behind, in search of new horizons and authentic experiences. Naturally, the way the word is used to group the artists presented in Seoul will be slightly different.

The oeuvre of some of them, such as Francis Alÿs and Honoré d’O, can be defined as inextricably related to their moving and walking all over the globe, in order to discover and understand new possibilities for their activities as an artist. Sometimes their work merges with their walking and can suddenly become contaminated by social and political undertones. For these artists, walking is a kind of declaration of readiness to accept the consequences of their decisions and to overrule the laws of physics in order to replace them by a speculative new set of laws.
‘Wanderlust’ is a wonderful notion that marks a profound poetic dimension in the work of conceptual artist Joëlle Tuerlinckx as well. She readdresses the freshness of the oldest souvenirs in human memory - the beginnings of signs and significance - with a remarkable force. Her work is intimately related to the urge, felt by the most famous Belgian artist Marcel Broodthaers, to travel from the present and oppressing stupidity of contemporary society, in order to create a safe haven. He does this by means of Winter Garden, composed out of palm trees, garden chairs and images found in an illustrated encyclopedia. These pictures invite us all to travel through time and space by means of our own imagination. Last but not least, the well known inventive genius Panamarenko. His oeuvre addresses a large variety of poetic solutions for unresolved engineering problems that he often faced himself. Each of his works shows us another dimension of ‘Wanderlust’ and can be understood as a comment on the fully engineered reality of contemporary Seoul.

The exhibition will be commented upon by a number of “citations” including old and new masters such as: Goethe, Duchamp, Boetti, Buckminster Fuller, etc.

Seoul