Location: Brussels, Belgium.
Date: 2022
Programme: Scenography & Artwork
Client: Bozar
Status: Completed
Team: Traumnovelle
Sammy Baloji
Johan Lagae
Photography: Philippe De Gobert / Palais des Beaux-Arts – Bozar, Bruxelles
For Project Palace, artist Sammy Baloji, architectural historian Johan Lagae and Johnny Leya of the architecture collective Traumnovelle entered into dialogue with about the Centre’s relationship with Belgium's colonial past.
Their contribution gathers historical sources on two cultural institutions in Congo from the 1950s with a similar historical mission as the Palace: the - ultimately unbuilt - Centre culturel in Kinshasa (ex-Leopoldville) and the theater of Lubumbashi (ex-Elisabethville). In their urban situation, their architecture and decoration, and their programming, both institutions are direct exponents of a late
colonial cultural guardianship.
In dialogue with the historical material, two new works are presented on the large windows opening onto the Horta Hall: Traumnovelle draws reinterpretation of the monumental urban axis of the urban project Le Grand Léo (1948-49) along which the Centre Culturel du Congo belge was to be built.
Sammy Baloji pays tribute to a lost mural in the Lubumbashi theater, executed by young Congolese painters from the so-called École d'Elisabethville whose work was exhibited at the Palace in 1956, the year of the theater's inauguration.
Finally, they select one piece from L'Art nègre, a 1930 exhibition at the Palace that presented ethnographic artifacts as autonomous art objects: a Chokwe chair collected around 1905 and exhibited frequently throughout the 20th century, often as a "hidden treasure" of the Africa Museum of Tervuren. In 2010, the chair returned to the Palace as part of the Geographics exhibition. Sammy Baloji (°1978, Lubumbashi), Johan Lagae (°1968, Bruges) and Traumnovelle (°2017, Brussels)
Text by : Wouter Davidts
Project Palace Centenary
2022 is the time to celebrate for Bozar. 4 April 1922, Brussels Town Hall: The date when the Centre for Fine Arts (‘Palais des Beaux-Arts’) was officially launched. The judicial basis for the construction and the associated ambition of creating an arts centre had become a reality. The statutes that establish this historic moment are the starting point for centenary celebrations that begin with the Project Palace exhibition and a celebratory programme in April 2022.
Bozar, together with curator Wouter Davidts, has invited 10 artists to participate in the celebrations by producing new work that reflects on what an arts centre such as Bozar can and should be now and into the future. They put the spotlight on the arts centre today, yet viewed through the filter of the past. We invite you to do the same. Share their journey through glimpses of the long history of the Centre for Fine Arts - including the chance to view a number of works exhibited in the past, and selected by our artists, that are now returning to Bozar. But do not expect a history of the ‘Palace’ but rather an artistic retelling and a look to the future.
Project Palace is just the beginning of a whole series of celebratory events. On 4 May 1928 the exhibition rooms at the Centre for Fine Arts finally opened their doors to the public. A year later the public attended the first concert in the magnificent Henry Le Boeuf Hall.
Selected artists: Lara Almarcegui, Sammy Baloji & Johan Lagae & Traumnovelle, Lynn Cassiers, Jeremiah Day, Sylvie Eyberg, Liam Gillick, Auguste Orts, Annaïk Lou Pitteloud, Koen van den Broek, Belgian Institute Graphic Design.
