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We made it! The group exhibition Troupe/troep has effectively taken place at ChezKit and we couldn’t have been more pleased. 

Now it’s a matter of documenting the project on a dedicated page with images of the show, information about the participating artists and accompanying texts. We also intend to publish an (online) book on the project. for now find some first images as well as general information on the show.

One of the starting points for the development for this project on chaos and non-linearity, was the photographic short film ALL TIME IS ALL TIME by Ivan Blazhev and Mike Blow. The film is inspired by Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse 5 and the controversial bombing of Dresden at the end of World War II in which the entire historic core of the city was razed to the ground. The film focusses on the reconstruction of the city as a pretext for exploring history, memories, their fragility, and nonlinear, broken time. From this Troupe/troep was developed as a reflection on current times, the fragmentation, chaos and waste of the world, questioning the body and its functioning in times of crises, connecting the human and non-human, trying to find sense and beauty in the discarded. But it also became a project about risk taking in which a band of artists, artworks, a curator and an artist space try to figure out what they are doing in uncertain times. What does it mean to organize an exhibition against the grain when culture is deemed to be ‘non-essential’?

The troupe or band consists out of seemingly unconnected figures, not unlike the meeting of artists that would eventually form the first Dada group in the Zurich of 1916. Some of the troupe’s members are, like Mike Blow, affiliated with Bureau Doove – Sara Bomans, Alexandra Dementieva, Hantu (weber + delsaux), Remco Roes (here in collaboration with Koenraad Claes) and Neil Wood. To this were added Benoît Géhanne, who’s inspiring studio visit made me discover Pantin, and Chloé Elmaleh, one of the artists working at ChezKit. And then there’s the group of graduates that I had the pleasure of meeting and working with at ESADHaR Le Havre-Rouen while teaching there: Julie Canu, Lucas Cyrille, Louise Delacroix, Fleure Leclere, Si Liu, Thomas Maestro, Tom Sagit, Agathe Schneider and Wenyu Zhang. But basically there are no divisions or categories, only meetings, conversations and exchanges. The Dutch word troep has the same pronunciation as the French troupe, but it is not just a repetition or alliteration. It adds the sense of messiness to the mix, which is however used in a constructive way.

Troupe/troep took place from 29 to 31 January 2021 at ChezKit in Pantin.

Image Edith Doove, Found, 2006