The Curse of Smooth Operations at Steenweg
IMPAKT Festival 2022 exhibition
— 30 December 2022
Wednesday to Sunday, 12:00 – 17:00
We are closed on 24 and 25 December
With artworks by Marc Bauer, Anita Di Bianco and Vincent Graf.
This second exhibition of The Curse of Smooth Operations brings Anita Di Bianco’s installation Corrections and Clarifications, specially commissioned for the IMPAKT Festival 2022, in dialogue with a wall drawing by Marc Bauer created on-site for The Curse of Smooth Operations and a drawn animation film by Vincent Graf.
Corrections and Clarifications is an ongoing publication, launched in response to the glut of news reporting following 11 September 2001 — an annual edited compilation of daily revisions, retractions, re-wordings, distinctions and apologies to print, online, and radio news. Each issue is a reverse-chronological catalogue of lapses in naming and classification, of tangled catchphrases, patterns of mis-speech and inflection, connotation and enumeration, a distillation of predictive patterns and algorithmic amplifications spanning from the initial deployments of the term “fake news” to the current reckoning with the attention economy.
For The Curse of Smooth Operations Di Bianco produces a new edition of the Corrections looking at press in Dutch and English. On 6 November 2022, Matter of Divergence, a performative reading by Alena Alexandrova, will be hosted at Steenweg 26. Two additional events on 29 November and 1 December 2022: What’s in a Word? Notes on Feminist Publishing, a talk with Delphine Bedel and Memories of Displacement a screening with short films by Adnan Softić, Eliane Esther Bots, Zacharias Zitouni and Aylin Kuryel, relate to Di Bianco’s examination of today’s totalizing information landscape and (online) media culture.
Disavowing any claim to completeness, methodological accuracy or objectivity, Marc Bauer’s wall drawing synthesises collected imagery into vivid narratives in which historical and fictional elements and events from different contexts and times are layered, subverted and intertwined. History, memory, identity and gender, migration and the connections between violence, religion and sexuality play across his works ranging from large-scale wall drawings to animation films and works on paper.
Vincent Graf’s six-minutes animation 22.11.18, drawn with charcoal on a single sheet of paper, depicts a sequence of news images which were published on 22 November 2018 in various Swiss newspapers. The images appear and are erased, leaving signs and traces, one image replacing another, each pencil and eraser stroke bring closer the visible and inevitable disintegration of the paper underneath the drawings.
WEEKLY EXHIBITION TOURS
All tours start at IMPAKT (Lange Nieuwstraat 4) and end at the second exhibition location in an empty retail shop at Steenweg 26.
Are you a member of We Are Public? With your membership you can join the tours for free! Log in on the website of We Are Public to see how to get your free ticket.
- Saturday 19 November | 14:00 | Tour in English | Join this tour
- Saturday 26 November 14:00 | Tour in Dutch | Join this tour
- Saturday 3 December 2022 | 14:00 | Tour in Dutch | Join this tour
- Saturday 10 December | 14:00 | Tour in Dutch | Join this tour
- Saturday 17 December | 14:00 | Tour in English | (TOUR CANCELLED)
- Saturday 7 January | 14:00 | Tour in the presence of artist Zachary Formwalt | Join this tour