Artists Kasper Bosmans
Venue Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art,
Photography Aad Hoogendoorn
With Decorations, Kasper Bosmans reimagines past projects through a series of new works, including an artist publication, painterly interventions in select archival boxes, sculptures and large-scale murals. Bosmans engages with recurrent themes distilled from the archive, including migration, domesticity, sexuality, urban development, and ecology.
Prompted by the absence of folk art in Witte de With’s exhibition history, Decorations also features documents taken from artist Asger Jorn’s photographic archive 10,000 Years of Nordic Folk Art, a project part of his Scandinavian Institute for Comparative Vandalism, founded in 1961 as an interdisciplinary institute aimed at ‘vandalizing’ art history.
As a permanent yet discrete intervention into Witte de With’s archive, Bosmans selected a number of archival boxes containing the documentation of projects he closely relates to on a formal, anecdotal, or conceptual level. Using the inside of the lids of these boxes as his canvas, Bosmans paints a visual encryption in which he symbolically translates the content of these archive boxes and the stories surrounding the project it houses. These small paintings are inserted in the very material structure of the archive as a silent presence, only to be revealed to future researchers.
