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The Royal Museum of Fine Arts of Brussels (Musée Royaux des Beaux-Arts de Bruxelles / De Koninklijk Museum van Schone Kunsten Brussel) was founded in 1801, thirty years before the existence of Belgium. The museum was founded by decree from Napoleon Bonaparte, as an exhibition space for the works of the First French Republic. After his defeat, Brussels came under the control of the Dutch Crown. Attempts to make the museum into a royal collection at this time failed and the museum remained a municipal institution until after the Belgian revolution of 1830, and the establishment of Belgium as an independent state with Brussels as its capital. In 1835, the institution became a national museum for the new Belgian state, by decree of the new king, Leopold I.

This history of changing hands and waxing and waning interests may account for the museum’s peculiar holdings. More meagre in masterpieces than museums in the neighbouring cities of Paris, Amsterdam, Antwerp and Cologne, the museum nonetheless contains many treasures, particularly of the so-called ‘Golden Age’ of Flemish and Dutch painting. Restoration budgets in the museum are low, and consistent problems with leaks mean several works show visible damage or have been removed from public view. When we first visited the museum together, we mostly spoke about its displays, about how they shed light onto the paradoxes and compromises of the city. As an institution which receives federal funding, all information in the museum is legally required to be available in Dutch and French, though inconsistencies are common between texts in the two languages. Later attempts to incorporate English for foreign visitors often feel awkwardly tacked on; inconsistently present, with no discernable patterns in terms of placement, font choice, or material support.

In Die Wahrheit der niederländischen Malerie, art writer Helmut Draxler outlines the different conceptions of space in 16th century painting, as they occurred in Italy vs. the Lowlands (that is, what is now Belgium, the Netherlands, and parts of Germany). Renaissance painting in Italy had concerned itself with trying to resurrect classical ideals of balance and harmony into the religious world order of (then) contemporary Italy. In the Lowlands, however, metropoles like Antwerp and Amsterdam were experimenting with an early incarnation of the private art market. Where Italy had fixed point perspective, a unified system for a unified conception of the world, Niederlandish painters often exploited various perspectival points within a single image, for narrative effect. One pertinent trope of the era is the inclusion of mirrored surfaces in the painting, which reflect the space of the painter or the viewer themselves, often literally incorporating the painter’s self portrait in mirror.

In Panel 3, The Banker and his Wife (ca. 1514) demonstrates exactly the sense of space that Draxler describes. A mirror on the table reflects a mysterious figure from beyond the pictorial frame. A shifted perspective in the image’s right hand side opens onto a deal between two passersby, outside the room in which the money changer counts his coins. The painting in Brussels is not by the Flemish master painter Quentin Massys. It is a diligent, painstaking copy of the original, made by an unknown painter, likely active in Antwerp in the same years as Massys. The original work (translated sometimes as “The Money Changer and his Wife” or “The Money Lender and his Wife”) is currently displayed in the duplicate Louvre museum in Abu Dhabi.

In Panel 1, Phillipe Van Bree’s Atelier of the Women Painters (ca. 1831) depicts a gathering of female artists, all of whom gather to paint another woman dressed in the skin of a bear; an uneasy drag of both predator and prey. Three of the woman painting smoke cigarettes as they work, a long-standing trend among artists, but a remarkable depiction of women at the time. Beside this gathering, Sophie Nys’ Artefact (20th century) presents a readymade object in the guise of geometric abstraction. A solid pine, Black Forest toilet seat, likely belonging to Martin Heidegger. In his notorious final interview with Der Spiegel, the German philosopher claims:

That everything functions, that the functioning propels everything more and more toward further functioning, and that technicity increasingly dislodges man and uproots him from the earth. I don’t know if you were shocked, but certainly I was shocked when a short time ago I saw the pictures of the earth taken from the moon. We do not need atomic bombs at all to uproot us -- the uprooting of man is already here.

Below these two paintings, Melchior d’Hondecoeter depicts a dead cock (17th century), hung by its feet.

In Panel 2, we see two afterlives of two paintings by Breugel the Elder. These two paintings serve as reminders of how much the circulation of images forms a part of their meaning. The Yawner (ca. 1560), has been cropped, cut down to the shape of an oval to suit its owner so that only half of the artist’s signature is visible. The painting was found in the archive of Peter Paul Rubens, after his death, and only later under- stood to have likely come from a larger set of seven paintings depicting the seven deadly sins. One other sin painting by Bruegel exists in Montpellier. The other five were either never painted or have since been lost. Another copy: In The Peasant and the Birdnester (2024), Jannis Marwitz reproduces the two characters from another Breugel painting (with the same title, painted 1568 and now housed in the Old Masters collection in Vienna). The two characters are expertly painted in tempera, but the background has been left out, given over to a surface of non-pictorial painting. The space between the two figures has been compressed, so that they can share space on the tiny panel of this study. The original title for the Breugel work has been attributed to a Dutch saying, “Who studies the nest has the knowledge, who robs it has the nest.”

The Old Masters collection in Brussels is supplemented by a series of five connected Royal Museums in the city. One such institution, the Wiertz Museum, is particularly beloved by artist friends in the city. This museum, founded by the Belgian painter Anoine Wiertz (1806-1865) as his atelier, and funded by the Belgian state under the promise that it would become a museum after his death, shows the inflationary space of a ballooning ego. As an artist, Wiertz determined the staging of his own practice, consciously blended with a staging of Belgium as a state. A manifesto in the first hall reads: “Brussels is the city, Paris the periphery.” Many of the canvasses in the museum’s central room are too large to ever leave the building. They are supplemented by an incredibly eclectic collection of other paintings by Wiertz in genres ranging from social critique, to trompe l'oeil, to fantasias. In Panel 4, Fabrice Schneider shows the two front doors of this museum, with their painted mottos, buckling under a fish-eye lens.

_26/10/24

All photos by Fabrice Schneider.
(c) Sophie Nys, Jannis Marwitz, Fabrice Schneider, Mauer and Winona.

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Dear -

This Saturday, Winona present a series of photographs of the GGSD grain silo construction (1983-84) by Tony Haemers, arranged by Winona.

In the vitrine of Passage Bailli-Louise, Avenue Louise 195.

Opening reception from 15.00-21.00.

Please feel warmly welcome.

Yours,

Winona.

All photos by Fabrice Schneider.
(c) Tony Haemers and Winona.

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"I’m more interested in dealing with holes in my own way." [1]
"My family arrived in Dusseldorf in 1951. [...] Vast numbers of refugees had arrived and we all needed somewhere to live, but the city was shot to pieces." [2]

In 1994, Chris Reinecke began making works with photographs, inks, crayons, paints and writings on pieces of stiff cardboard that she would then perforate, cut and precariously assemble by hand. These pieces were a pronounced departure from the more conceptual leaning and action-based practice that had made her reputation in the 1960s and 70s, as well as from the large-scale, narrative/mythic paintings she had been making during the 1980s. At the time she began this new mode of working, she was living in the small, West-German city of Duisburg, where she would write long lists of observations and take photographs of the tunnel systems under the city. When we have spent time with Chris in her apartment by the Dusseldorf main station, she speaks often about the comings and goings and cars and people and the mushroom-lake transformations in city life that are visible from her window. An important motif in her work is 'Die Beobachterin verlässt ihren stätionaren Posten' — the observer that leaves her stationary post.

This is a way of working that has come to CR out of time spent in tunnels. They are works about surfaces, but their surfaces are pitted with holes, apertures, cavities and escape routes. These holes, as well as the shadows they cast, are as much the stuff of the work as the paper is. (Half present + half absent = spectral). At the time CR was growing up in Dusseldorf and studying at the Academy, West Germany had been thoroughly bombed-out by the allies and was being hurriedly reconstructed from new building materials and new wealth. In her words, the city was becoming "more American." It is very difficult now to get a sense of the massive scale of this transformation. By all accounts, Dusseldorf in the postwar years was in a cloud of change and was programmatically non-nostalgic; disruption being, as always, a sibling of new possibilities for living.

The formal techniques of hole-making and precarious assemblage in CR’s current works behave like a mimesis of her urban environment. This mimesis is not material—ie. not made from glass, concrete or steel—but it shares the city’s compulsions toward movement, impermanence and frenzied assemblage. This insistent push/pull motion be- tween processes like rupture and repair, expansion and consolodation is also the political stake of the works. These pieces are felt out and worked though rather more they are premeditated.

CR works in her apartment, between the floor and the wall of her living room. This production dynamic of floor-to- wall-to-floor-to-wall is crucial to the piece’s affect. Through it, she combines the overhead, aerial view of the cartographer with the face to face confrontation of the painter. The largest of the pieces in this exhibition significantly exceeds CR’s height. In the small living room where it was made, it is massive.

In more recent years, CR’s work has become more formal and abstract, less sociological, in its orientation. Since she no longer goes out into the street to make photographs, the large window of her first-floor apartment has become an important interface between her and the city. Consequently, the work has developed an intense involvement with the interplay of different qualities and systems of surfaces. In these pieces, the complex nest of overlaid and interwoven grids (cut, painted, drawn, woven) produces the electric, vista-like virtual spaces of the work.

Where these new works do connect to CR’s iconoclastic first phase in the 1960s and 70s, is in the oblique ways that they point toward digitality. CR held an early student job where she worked at a computer. At around the same time, she made a number of actions drawing textile-like patterns from sets of zeroes and ones for the duration of an eight-hour work day. This visionary conflation of digital code, textiles and women’s labour (already in the 1960s) massively precedes the later theorisation of writers like Sadie Plant and N. Katherine Hayles. Though CR’s new works are manifestly analogue (she does not own a computer) they share in one of the base truths of computing: that a series of small, binary decisions — yes/no, on/off, over/under etc. — can together produce effects of dynamic and spectral complexity.

_25/02/2023

[1] Chris Reinecke, Zeit und Arbeit. Momente. Werke von 1965 bis 2016. (Dusseldorf: Beck&Eggeling Kunstverlag, 2016)
[2] Chris Reinecke interviewed by Hans-Jurgen Hafner, "Building Time." Frieze Magazine no 186, April 2017.

All photos by Silvia Cappellari.
(c) Chris Reinecke and Winona.

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"Sometimes the words tell the shapes what to be and sometimes the shapes tell the words what to be." - David Daniels

David Daniels was a self-taught American poet born in 1933 in Newark, New Jersey, died in 2008 in Berkley California. His work consists of many hundreds of shaped poems painstakingly typed out on various versions of Microsoft Word and self-published as PDFs on his website. Lining the walls of Winona is a selection of 64 such poems, from his magnum opus, The Gates of Paradise, which he wrote between 1988 and 2000. Daniels refers to each of the 350 poems in the collection as "gates". He is interested, he says, in opening "[him]self and other people up and seeing what is inside."

What is prescient in these poems is Daniels’ early realisation that, despite appearances, MS Word is a tool of the hand made. Already at the beginning of personal computing, he had understood the possibility of the medium as a kind of folk art, equivalent to needle-point or mosaic where simple and available tools can be turned toward extremely complex ends, not by grand design but through the moment to moment decisions of someone familiar with the medium. He understood, too, a kind of short circuiting that was then occurring between the intimate space of the personal computer and the planetary scale of networked computing, both of which were rampantly accelerating around him in California in the time these poems were written.

The poems speak to both scales simultaneously. They are cosmic in their outlook, dealing endlessly with themes of transformation, alchemical shifts in the state of matter, and testimonies of animate objects ("if x could talk"). At the same time, they are prosaic and personal. They speak the languages of folksy aphorisms, sexual frustration and bad jokes. The poems might be said to share in a certain cabalistic tradition of Jewish writing in which language can be endlessly broken down into smaller parts and rearranged atomically, not to in order to form "meaning" per se, but to create junctions of sense and sudden realisations. There is a leitmotif (present in almost every poem) which acts as the poems’ eternal return. It goes: "Stars shine bright on shatter light."

Elsewhere in the space are three sculptural works by Anna Van Der Ploeg. On the floor, an a4 poster from a community notice-board has been scaled up massively in the manner of an allegory. Across from it, a painting without image squares off against a book made from holes. Anna says the book is a scale model for some larger, future sculpture. There is a sort of theatre happening here.

This book might be be the central image of the show. A language made of holes, a syntax of gaps, a grammar of subtractions (Could we call it a punchcard?). The book is a space through which language has to navigate, a set of shapes through which it must squeeze itself, and a collection of leaks through which it might escape. There is nothing to keep language there. And the book and the painting are like lovers. They belong to one another and yet they don’t. They wear the names of two folk singers, endlessly singing to the absence of the other in the way that singers of love songs do.

Well, I’ll be damned
Here comes your ghost again [...]
You who are so good with words
And at keeping things vague
’Cause I need some of that vagueness now.

_03/12/2022

All photos by Silvia Cappellari.
(c) Anna Van Der Ploeg, David Daniels and Winona.

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Since it needs to take place in the future, all planning requires leaps of faith. This act of leaping and the speculative distance it covers is inextricable from how we think about the future. Even relatively banal and stable predictions ("it will rain tomorrow") require complex acts of interpretation, faith and assumption. It is a kind of science fiction not in the narrative sense of spaceships or a coming apocalypse but in the small every day sense of assuming a plausible future at least enough that you can choose an outfit, make dinner plans, decide on a career, vote, or fall in love.

One model for thinking about this connection is gambling. The casino is a highly controlled, diagrammatic space in which to ideas of speculation and continuation get negotiated nightly. In a game of roulette, for instance, players bet their money against one of a set of possible futures. When the wheel is spun, the white ball will land somewhere and it is the role of the player to stake a claim as to where. The higher the speculative leap, the higher the payout. A European roulette wheel contains black and red squares numbered 1-36 which fan across the wheel and green square ("the zero") at its centre. A player who can predict the right number gets their money back 36 times over. However, remembering the green zero, the odds of a correct bet are 1 in 37, meaning the reward dips just below the risk. This one 37th gap or remainder gives the casino a constant competitive edge that allows the future continuation of the whole system. While the individual fortunes of players may rise and fall, the essential stability of the game is guaranteed by the green zero.

The objects in this exhibition also display a diagrammatic musculature. They too are models for futures: An economist’s prediction for a way out of the planet’s economic trouble; a scale model of a Los Angeles bank built from memory and a real estate prospectus; two plinths as remainders or shares from a previous exhibition. All of the models speak the language of economics as the field in which the questions of future and speculation are most frequently rehearsed. They employ a grammar of predictions and remainders. In each of these proposals, it is the gaps and spaces ("space for notes") that give meaning to the solid space around it. This meaning is inflationary. It is made of competing associations that fill the voids in the models. In this way, the model remains open. Meaning hovers like a magic trick. As with the green zero on the roulette wheel, the gaps here do not perform the role of ruptures, but as guarantors of a smooth continuation. Maybe part of what the diagram promises is that things could be otherwise. Diagrams suggest that certain values can be swapped out and that by doing so we might get a glimpse of an alternative future. The better the model the greater the fidelity of the prediction. The simpler the model the greater the demand for faith.

_23/09/2022

All photos by Silvia Cappellari.
(c) Kathi Hofer and Winona.

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Recently, in the New York Times, an article claimed the resurgence of the ‘conversation pit’ — a soft and sunken living room structure synonymous with the 1960s and 70s. If it is true that the conversation pit is making a comeback, we want to know: what is it about this particular relic of mid-century design that speaks to the current moment? The article makes the suggestion that the conversation pit is an antidote to an atomised society: conversation pits mean face-to face interaction, unmediated by screens and satellites. But this neat, quasi-conservative, back-to-the-good-old-days thinking sits uneasily against the article’s other key observation: that is, conversation pits are mostly consumed as images. Indeed, the lush colours and geometry seem to circulate seamlessly via social media platforms. Our own design process for this exhibition began the same way: a stream of drooled-over images traded back-and-forth over phone screens. Desire thinly veneered as research.

Together, these two observations suggest the conversation pit as a curious kind of hybrid object, both a physical rejection of contemporary communication technologies and a virtual space remotely inhabited via the very technologies it would seem to refuse. Is a conversation pit better to look into or to look out from?

This exhibition began as a plan to build a full-scale, useable model of a conversation pit in the tiled space of Winona, to test the online and offline dynamics of this architectural feature in contemporary Brussels. Gradually, that hollow form got filled up with contributions from artists who lent or fabricated works for the setting. By happy coincidence, many of these works were collaborations. The invitations also turned into a program of talks, readings, and concerts that will take place in the coming weekends. It got filled up too, or will, with the slumped and lounging bodies of visitors. Put basically, the pit is a container in which to collectively experiment with how those elements will collide and interact and (ideally) generate pulsing, hallucinatory conversation.

The works included oscillate similarly between the onsite and the remote. The red vinyl pattern which covers two walls was sent as a vector graphic by Jim Isermann, from his chosen home in Palm Springs, California. For decades, Jim has been making radically decorative work that traffics between minimalist aesthetics and the functional utopias of design. Nina Canell and Robin Watkins sent their work as a sound file to be played through the pit’s quad sound system. On September 2, we will sit and listen to it together. Shirin Sabahi’s work is a window vinyl from an iterative series, scaled to fit Winona’s street facing window. What appears as decorative, abstract geometry is in fact derived from patterns of tape used to secure windows from bomb blasts or earthquakes in unstable environments. Simon Denny leant us a set of custom postage stamps, produced collaboratively with the stamp designer Linda Kantchev, each of which commemorate one of the companies that in 2016 (the year of the work’s making), were designing the infrastructures and vectors of decentralised currency trading. Miles Huston’s work takes the form of a set of remote-viewing tools. On three paddles are three altered reproductions of paintings by Arnold Clapman produced for Paul Lafolley. Clapman’s paintings are themselves reconstructions based on descriptions of an earlier set of paintings by the Boston artist Richard Upton Pickman, who (Pickman) claims to have based them of live drawing sessions with a number of demon children living in the sewers under Boston’s North End. By holding the paddles at arm’s length and staring at the three coloured dots for 30 seconds, viewers can summon spectral hallucinations of Clapman’s now-destroyed paintings of Pickman’s lost works. In contemporary architecture, the stakes of the there-and-not-there dilate along axes of supply. What is remote can be brought closer. Brianna Leatherbury arranged her contribution as a set of dispatches of non-functional buttons from Amazon which will gradually populate the space of Winona over the course of the show. Of all the artists included, only Cecilia Bjartmar Hylta worked on-site, installing a discarded and inverted steel bollard from the streets of Brussels as a subtraction from the volume of the pit’s structure.

The experiment of the exhibition will be cast against the next 4 weeks of its showing. As an experiment, its aims are open ended, its metrics for success or failure unclear. Life gets lived below floor level.

_20/08/2022

All photos by Marina Pinsky and edited by Silvia Cappellari.
(c) Marina Pinsky, Shirin Sabahi, Simon Denney, Jim Isermann, Miles Huston, Brianna Leatherbury, Cecilia Bjartmar Hylta, Nina Canell and Winona.

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"Sometimes, when a man is holding a pencil, his hand won’t release it no matter how badly he wants to let go. Instead the hand tightens rather than opens."

--

There’s a passage in a book by Maurice Blanchot which describes the writer as a man with two hands: The right hand writes, wants desperately to write, while the left hand cannot or chooses not to. The right hand holds the pencil involuntarily, like an addict following a desire that is neither properly outside nor inside of them. The left hand doesn’t write but it can reach out and take the pencil, to interrupt what is being written. “Mastery,” Blanchot concludes, “always characterises the other hand, the one that doesn’t write.”

There are 4 or maybe 5 sculptural works in this exhibition, which Benedikt calls Essays zum Stand der Dinge (“Essays on the State of Things”). A car was in the wrong place at the wrong time, a fire has burned to the end, a man is running late, a pig considers its reflection, a building will soon be built. Like the left hand’s intervention, all of these short stories relate to time in complex ways. They are generic in the way that an allegory should be and they are specific in the way that an allegory should be. (Open enough. Closed enough). The fruit gets boiled down to its sugars to make jam. Like most art and story-telling, this is a question of economy too, about big returns on possible meaning for small expenditures on time and materials. (“And what was Marx’s left hand doing while his right wrote Das Kapital?”)

If we accept that writing is a negotiation between two desires that map onto the two hands, then writing is also a negotiation of two times: A right-handed time that is continuous and horizontal and a left-handed time that is discontinuous and vertical. The right hand desires the infinite prolongation of time, the deferral of judgement or conclusion. The left hand insists upon the break, the full-stop, the deadline about which meaning will have to organise itself. Time is suddenly coming down. What is left is left. Both of these times are part of writing, or maybe writing is just a plane on which these times have to get negotiated. The cosmic nature of this negotiation is equaled only by its banal everyday-ness. This is often how it happens and it happens very often.

For many of us, the central allegory of this show will be the wild boar who enters into the mirrored room, into language, into culture. When the animal sees itself in the mirror, does it see itself as a beast?

_13/05/2022

All photos by Silvia Cappellari.
(c) Benedikt Bock and Winona.

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Dears-

The next event at Winona, Brussels. 2 x 2 performances on a Sunday afternoon.

Front Lighting, Back Channel
Mutual - Theo Livesey
Secrets (Did I have to wear a hat?) - Francesca Hawker.

Each session includes both performances and lasts for 1 hour.

Winona is a very small room.
Numbers are very limited and registration is necessary.
Message CU via Whatsapp to reserve a place.

16h00 | Session 1
Fran Theo

18h00 | Session 2
Theo Fran

Winona

All photos by Nikolaj Jessen.
(c) Francesca Hawker, Theo Livesey and Winona.

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Refined Sugars is the first show at Winona. It’s an exhibition of sorts and an event of sorts. It won’t last more than the evening. Since we’re new in the neighbourhood we wanted to take the excuse to have a party. There’s a wonderful bakery on the corner of rue de l’Intendant and rue de Ribaucourt who can print images on cakes. They print them with edible dyes onto paper made of sugar and when they mount it it melts and transfers the image right into the surface of the cake. What better way to open a new chapter than inviting all of our friends to participate in its consumption?

The images are all made by friends of ours too. Mekhitar took the photograph of the hummus, after a plate made by his mother. Margaux compiled the table of recent public apologies, with the size of the apology defining the slice of the cake (Risk Reward Ratio). Emile made the green image of a man and a woman back when he still had a studio in the previous building of Level 5. The flavours and the decorations were decided by each of the artists in collaboration with the bakery — like the relationship between a painter and a framer. Chocolate for Mekhitar, lemon for Margaux, whipped cream for Emile. By the time you read this text, its likely that the exhibition will be wholly or partly moved into throats and bellies, so you’ll have to believe us when we say they were beautiful images, made more beautiful by the knowledge they were printed on perishable materials.

A first show in a new space should be lo-fi and potlatch. It should be about finding ways to work with what’s at hand. About channelling the local and the familiar in order to make things happen. This is how a project space can function on limited means. Our overheads in this space are low. The rent we each pay is roughly equivalent to a basic gym membership, which helps to free the space from the need to justify itself to external demands from a market or from a funding body. The basic attitude might be called unproductive. A dead end. We spend with the left hand what we earn with the right. In a little over a year this whole building will be torn down. By the end of the night this exhibition will be consumed.

In English, people say “you can’t have your cake and eat it too” which is a way of forcing the dichotomy between the conservation value of a thing and the use value of a thing. It defines an opposition between aesthetics on one hand and utility on the other. The rarefied thing (the kept cake) vs. the consumption of the same thing, or rather its conversion into energy, pleasure and fat. In the end, where we locate ourselves within this dichotomy might be revealing of some larger stakes in the production of contemporary art…

_19/02/2022

All photos by Nikolaj Jessen.
(c) Mekhitar Garabedian, Margaux Schwarz, Emile Rubino and Winona.

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