8th BIENNIAL OF PAINTING AT MUSEUM DHONDT-DHAENENS

"The 't' is Silent"

- Until 02.10.2022

8th Biennial of Painting

The ‘t’ is Silent

From 26 June to 2 October 2022, the three art museums on the banks of the Leie river – Museum Dhondt-Dhaenens, Museum van Deinze en de Leiestreek and Roger Raveel Museum – present the 8th edition of the Biennial of Painting.

MDD’s exhibition, entitled The ‘t’ is Silent, is curated by curator Gabi Ngcobo and artist Oscar Murillo.

Painting, historically regarded as the ‘royal road’ of artistic practice, has over the centuries meant that the art form, alongside drawing, served as a foundation for artistic education, where such education was available. The history of western art pedagogy in colonised places across the world often reveals that the colonial government’s rule was indirectly played out in how formal artistic pedagogies were organised. The recent calls for decolonial education around the world – fuelled by the Black Lives Matter and other affiliated movements , as well as the pandemic – have inspired reconsiderations of the human condition and the politics of care. At the same time, these social movements have coincided with a new rise in representational painting that has been critiqued, in the words of artist Olu Oguibe, as “jolly, no-worries, all sunshine and flowers, ebullient wealthy middleclass representation of Blackness...”

The ‘t’ is Silent operates adjacent to this renewed emergence. Departing from the work of Jenny Montigny in MDD’s collection and Oscar Murillo’s Disrupted Frequencies, this exhibition focuses on artists and works that record time differently, works that are about painting or that think through the medium of painting as a form of journaling – of working things through and of learning anew.

“The artists featured in this exhibition face history and the present by embracing ‘trouble’ and a kind of ‘paining’ that forces one to decide, in a time marked indecision. Where objects disappear, they are replaced by feelings and energy; where they appear they are being dissected in order to uncover another world of possibilities.” – Gabi Ngcobo

Artists

Anh Trân, Annabelle Agbo Godeau, Brandon Ndife, Chemu Ng’ok, Dalton Paula, Donna Kukama, Francis Offman, Hamishi Farah, Jenny Montigny, Kerry James Marshall, Marcela Cantuária, Misheck Masamvu, Oscar Murillo.

Curators

Gabi Ngcobo (1974, eThekwini, South Africa) engages in collaborative artistic, curatorial, and educational projects in South Africa and on an international scope. She is a founding member of the Johannesburg based collaborative platform NGO – Nothing Gets Organised. NGO focuses on processes of selforganisation that take place outside of predetermined structures, definitions, contexts, or forms. She is currently the Curatorial Director at the Javett Art Centre at the University of Pretoria (Javett-UP). Ngcobo previously curated the 10th Berlin Biennale titled We don’t need another hero (2018). She was one of the co-curators of the 32nd Sao Paulo Bienal (2016) and co-curated A Labour of Love at the Weltkulturen Museum, Frankfurt, which later travelled to the Johannesburg Art Gallery (2015-2017).

Oscar Murillo (1986, Valle del Cauca, Colombia) is based in various locations. His body of work demonstrates a sustained emphasis on the notion of cultural exchange and the multiple ways in which ideas, languages, and even everyday items are displaced, circulated, and increasingly intermingled. Recent solo exhibitions have been held notably at KM21, The Hague; Fondazione Memmo, Rome; Mori Art Museum, Tokyo; and Saint Louis Art Museum, Missouri. In September 2022, the exhibition Oscar Murillo: A Storm Is Blowing From Paradise will open at the Scuola Grande della Misericordia in Venice. Murillo was one of four artists jointly awarded the Turner Prize in 2019

Museum Dhondt-Dhaenens

Museumlaan 14, B-9831 Deurle E.

info@museumdd.be

T. +32 (0)9-330 17 30

W. www.museumdd.be

Museum van Deinze en de Leiestreek

Lucien Matthyslaan 3/5, B-9800 Deinze

E. museum@deinze.be

T. +32 (0)9-381 96 70

W. www.mudel.be

Roger Raveel Museum

Gildestraat 2, B-9870 Zulte

E. rogerraveelmuseum@vlaanderen.be

T. +32 (0)9-381 60 00

W. www.rogerraveelmuseum.be

Pictures by © Rik Vannevel