ALL OUR YESTERDAYS

The group exhibition ALL OUR YESTERDAYS traces a lineage between three Belgium-based artists of different generations: LILI DUJOURIE (b. 1941), SOPHIE NYS (b. 1974), and ANGYVIR PADILLA (b. 1987). The exhibited works encompass sculpture, installation, photography, film, sound, and performance, and span a timeframe of over fifty years (1969–2023). By subverting signifiers of the domestic and destabilizing established artistic categories, the exhibition offers a fragmented narrative on temporality, memory, and loss. The artists consider how the body moves through time and space, leaving traces. They use the strategies of conceptual art but challenge its authority through a deep engagement with the physicality of their materials and a surrender to feeling. The exhibition is titled after a 1952 novel by Natalia Ginzburg set in Italy during the Second World War, in which a young female protagonist gradually crystallizes from a complex web of family relations. Her personal life is placed within the radical social and political changes taking place around her. The exhibition echoes the intertwining of the inner and outer lives, the private and public worlds of human beings. SOPHIE NYS mobilizes the latent meaning of forms and symbols with precision and a healthy dose of wit. Her water clock, fashioned from plastic buckets, refers to the klepsydra, an ancient technique that uses water to mark time. Other works by Sophie in the exhibition reference everyday objects but verge into suggestive territory: a leather bench to rest one’s knees, oversized toilet paper rolls made from yoga mats, deflated bouncing balls perched atop metal scaffolding. For Lits de camp [cots], the artist hiked for 19 kilometers while pulling ten meters of canvas behind her, thus ‘painting’ its surface through her movement. In each of these scenarios, the human body is absent but lingering, hovering between exhaustion and pleasure. LILI DUJOURIE is one of the most significant artists of her generation and has a special ability to connect with viewers both on an intellectual and a sensory level. The collage work Roman (5) is deceptively simple: Four tiny magazine snippets are glued on a long sheet of paper, the emptiness more dominant than the content. As in her canonical steel plate work Côté Couleurs, Côté Douleurs [Side of Colors, Side of Pains], the artist plays a game of exposure and concealment. She draws upon the sleek, industrial vocabulary of Minimalism while breaking it through her painterly gesture. The silent film Passion de l’été pour l’hiver [Summer’s passion for winter] is a slow, lingering search for stillness—this tension between movement and stasis is echoed in Memoires van de handen [Memories of the hands], sculptures shaped by the artist pressing her hands into clay. ANGYVIR PADILLA creates mixed-media installations that deal with the notions of home and memory. The works in the exhibition are rooted in an archive of photographs taken inside the artist’s childhood home, documenting the overwhelming piles of clothing her mother sells from their Caracas apartment. The artist printed these images onto costumes made of plaster and brought them to life in a performance during the exhibition opening. In another work, the artist has shrouded the images in wax and draped them over precarious metal structures. Nearby, a record plays the bolero classic Contigo En La Distancia [With you in the distance], recorded by Lucho Gatica in 1952, in reverse, a reminder of the impossibility to return to the past. Its sounds still reverberate through the space when encountering an installation of 3D printed sculptures, embedded in sand: a collaboration with the artist’s mother, who sent her snapshots of toys and domestic objects around the house. Breaking down the oppositions of documentation and memory, distance and desire, the lasting and the ephemeral, Angyvir brings us closer to an experience of reality by always slightly effacing it. LILI DUJOURIE (born 1941 in Roeselare, Belgium, lives and works in Lovendegem, Belgium) is a visual artist working mainly in sculpture, painting and video. She mixes influences of the Flemish Primitives with her artistic approach oriented to the late 1960s. Since 1968, she has had numerous exhibitions in Belgium and internationally and collaborates with the Antwerp gallery Micheline Szwajcer, where she last exhibited in late 2022. This presentation coincided with the unveiling of the new commissioned work Mimesis for KMSKA, on the occasion of its grand reopening. In 2015, S.M.A.K. in Ghent and Mu.ZEE Ostend dedicated a joint solo exhibition to the artist. Her other presentations include MuHKA, Antwerp (2022); Kohta, Helsinki (2020); Richard Saltoun Gallery, London (2019); Museum M, Leuven (2019); WIELS, Brussels (2018); Leopold-Hoesch-Museum, Düren (2014); BOZAR, Brussels (2005) and Argos, Brussels (2002). She previously exhibited at IKOB in 2001. SOPHIE NYS (b. 1974 in Antwerp, Belgium, lives and works in Brussels) pushes conceptual and minimalist artistic strategies to their logical and formal limits while maintaining their poetic eloquence as subjects of everyday life. She has exhibited at numerous national and international venues, including WIELS, Brussels (2020); Kunsthal Extra City, Antwerp (2019); KIOSK, Ghent (2019); Guimaraes, Vienna (2018); Fondazione Prada, Venice (2018); Galeria Quadrado Azul, Lisboa (2019); Archiv, Zurich (2015); CRAC Alsace, Altkirch (2015); Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (2013). Her films have been shown at FIDMarseille, BOZAR, e-flux, International Film Festival Rotterdam, Argos, Courtisane Festival, etc. Her work is represented by the galleries Greta Meert and Maniera (Brussels). She has been teaching at the LUCA School of Arts in Brussels since 2017. ANGYVIR PADILLA (b. 1987 in Caracas, Venezuela, lives and works in Brussels) creates immersive installations that distill the concept of "home" as an intimate place and relate this concept to people and nature. Padilla's artistic training took place in Belgium, first at ARBA in Brussels (2011-12), then at ENSAV La Cambre (2012-15) and Luca School of Arts (2016-18). In 2020 she was the third winner of the ArtContest and in 2021 she won the first prize of the Friends of the S.M.A.K.. Other presentations have taken place at the Krasj Festival in Ninove (2022), the Ithaka Festival in Leuven (2019), CIAP, Genk (2022), the S.M.A.K Museum and Cas-co Leuven (2018), while she has also made a name for herself internationally with exhibitions in Paris, Dunkerque, Belgrade, Athens and Caracas. She is currently participating in the Fiminco Foundation residency program in Paris.