Promising developments on the art scene in Limburg as two organisations join forces. Still this year, CIAP, platform for contemporary art, and FLACC, workplace for visual artists, will merge into one organisation, which will move to a new location at the C-mine site in 2022.

© Maximiliaan Royakkers

In 2018, the news of the future house for FLACC and CIAP at the C-mine site was announced. The architectural project, designed by 51n4e (Brussels) and Point Supreme (Athens), combines ateliers, living facilities, indoor and outdoor exhibition spaces, café, and a public garden. The project is supported by the city of Genk and the Flemish Community. In the last two years, CIAP and FLACC have been working behind-the-scenes on this new infrastructure, but also on the model for the new organisation that will inhabit it.

The two organisations jointly decided that merging is in the best interest of their shared future. The new organisation will combine the strengths and functions of both partners: FLACC, with their long-standing expertise as a workplace, supporting artistic development, and CIAP, with 45 years’ experience in mediating and exhibiting contemporary visual arts.

Working in synergy with C-mine and other like-minded partners, this new organisation will offer artists space, time, and resources to experiment and develop new projects, but also share them with others. With a broad array of activities — workshops, exhibitions, talks, social gatherings, and many more — it will become a new meeting space for artists, art lovers, neighbours, and broader public. The innovative, creative environment of C-mine and Genk — the city in constant transformation — provides a fertile ground for this new development. In line with Genk's past as “station d’artistes”, a beloved refuge for artists, researchers, and thinkers, this unique context offers an opportunity to become an artist colony of the future.

CIAP and FLACC are currently developing and sharpening the profile, programme, and identity of this new organisation. Meanwhile, you can follow their current programmes via their individual websites.

Een vogel vliegt op is a book about Hannelore Van Dijck's recent ink drawings and artist books. This publication crystallizes her search for a fluid way of working, a search for movement, rhythm and leaks. The launch coincides with a presentation of a video and the original drawings made during her residency at FLACC (Genk).

At 15h there will be a conversation between Nikolaas Demoen, publisher and Hannelore Van Dijck, artist. This conversation will also be streamed live on facebook and instagram.

Book release:
Sunday 9 May: 11 - 18:00. Book your time slot at 019 here.
019, Dok Noord 5L, Ghent

Posture Editions N° 41:
128 pages, 21 × 30 cm
ISBN 978 94 9126 242 5

Book and presentation in collaboration with Posture Editions, supported by the Flemish Government.

Jumana Manna’s exhibition at M HKA titled Thirty Plumbers in the Belly, is comprised of a new body of sculptures that move between the worlds of sewage, digestion and building sites. Central are two ceramic series: limb-pipes and rotten bread. The limb-pipes draw their primary reference from drainage tubing in use within urban and agricultural infrastructures since ancient times until today. Normally hidden behind walls, under pavements, and made to remove unwanted sights and smells from bodies, gardens and cities, they arrive at the site of the exhibition as metamorphosed conduits. The ceramic bread series exhibited in plastic bags and on metal fences, mimics the act of leaving old bread outdoors; a tradition of gift giving to an unknown receiver. These small-scaled sculptures consider the transformation of bread from an object of desire with nutritional value, to an unwanted anxiety; the sin of uneaten food – of wasted life.

Together with collaged scaffolding gauzes, rudimentary wooden planks and makeshift plinths, Thirty Plumbers in the Belly considers improvisational infrastructures in places where infrastructures are built to fail. The gathering of materials and anthropomorphic objects bears the processes of ruination and renewed symoblisation as both an aftermath and as a potentiality.

Jumana Manna’s exhibition has been produced through a collaboration between M HKA and FLACC – Workplace for Visual Arts, Genk, where the artist undertook a research and production residency during 2020 and 2021. Exhibition co-curated by Nav Haq, Associate Director, M HKA, and Luuk Nouwen, Artistic Director, FLACC.