Artists

Aurélie Bayad

Installation views

Curator

The 2023 exhibition of Generation Brussels, Cet obscur objet du désir, is curated by the art critic/ curator Sam Steverlynck and is entitled after the surrealist cinematographer Luis Buñuel’s eponymous masterpiece from 1977. This dark fable of lust and love was the last film of one of the greatest subversive minds in cinema. For Buñuel’s standards, it was one of his most conventional films, though there are subtle moments of disruption, alienation, and surrealist wit. The works on view at Generation Brussels do not specifically refer to the film’s theme let alone illustrate it. What the works of this upcoming generation of young Brussels-based artists share is the ambivalence of the film’s title. Their visual language might look attractive, the works at the same time have something dark and sometimes even threatening. Some of the video’s, sculptures and installations on view might come across as repulsive yet do exert a weird kind of attraction one can’t stop taking one’s eyes off. Even works that at first sight seem to be normal or familiar, have some hidden, ungraspable undercurrents. Hence, the exhibition invites the visitor on a at times surrealist journey between desire and repulsion, phantasms and impulses, the object and the abject (Kristeva), the familiar and the uncanny (Freud).

Sam Steverlynck | Curator

Sam Steverlynck is a Brussels-based art critic and curator. He has been writing for various Belgian and international publications, including De Standaard, Art Review, artpress, … From 2018 until 2021, he was editor-in-chief of HART magazine. In 2021, he was curator at the post-graduate training HISK. In 2022, he curated Zijn naam was Austerlitz/ Austerlitz was his name in A Tale of A Tub in Rotterdam with works from the Tlön collection, L’Oeuvre et son Double at Art Brussels with a selection of artists whose work was on view at the 2022 Venice Biennale and the solo exhibition The Constant Flow by Dani Ghercã for the National Museum of Contemporary Art in Bucharest (MNAC).

He is co-Founder of The Agprognostic Temple, a nomadic art space focusing on art and the esoteric, for which he curated various solo exhibitions (Zebedee Armstrong, Nicolas Provost, Léonard Pongo) and group shows. In February 2023, he curated Visions from the Underworld with The Agprognostic Temple which kickstarted Eleusis2023, Cultural Capital of Europe. For the exhibition diptych Poetics of Politics at Harlan Levey Projects in Brussels and Art Encouters Foundation at Timișoara (Romania), he unites the work of three Rumanian photographers who reflect on the transition from communism to capitalism by means of the medium of photography.

He currently works at S.M.A.K in Ghent where he co-curated the exhibition Pieter Engels: Fabulous Oldest Hits together with Philippe Van Cauteren.