Stayin alive

What can connect, nearly a century apart, two dandies as contradictory as Paul Valéry (1871-1945) and Yves Adrien (1951)? Answer: A common aversion to the museum, considered to be a necropolis!

For the former, a writer, a jack of all trades and even an example of the “national intellectual hero” during the interwar period, the museum is like a temple and a living room, a cemetery and a school... “A civilization that is neither voluptuous nor reasonable can alone have built this house of incoherence. I don't know what insane results from this neighborhood of dead visions. They are jealous and fight for the look that brings them existence.” In 1923, did he write in The Museum Problem. For the second, a rock critic, writer, and punk and post-punk theorist, the question is clear: “Isn't museum the deadliest word in the world? Yes.” Art is then only a gloomy thing (NovöVision. The Confessions of a Guinea Pig of the Century, 1980).

Contrary to these deadly ideas, Stayin' Alive. Discover the Collections invites you to discover the works in the BPS22 collections in order to share their vitality and strengths. Conceived as a succession of small formal, narrative or semantic segments, the exhibition promotes relationships between works, each responding to the other, enriching themselves by their mutual coexistence and unfolding their potentialities according to the combinations proposed. Through forty paintings, installations, photographs, drawings or videos, taken from the BPS22 collections and for the most part never shown, Stayin' Alive. Discover the Collections considers the museum to be an essential place for the activation of art and for sharing it with the greatest number of people.

With creations byBelgian and foreign artists, the exhibition thus paints a dynamic and living portrait of the BPS22 collections, articulated with the most current societal questions. Its title, Stayin' Alive, taken from the famous Bee Gees hit, assumes the reference to disco where the fever of the party only serves to forget, for a while, disarray and disillusionment. Thus, the works always address problems characteristic of our time, behind their poetic, dreamlike, humorous or magical aspects: migrations, new spiritualities, identity questions -especially gender-, interbreeding, economic exhaustion, environmental crisis... As evidenced, among others, Fake Protest Songs Karaoke by the Luxembourgish artist Filip Markiewicz.

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