Various Artists

Forty years after his graduation exhibition at KASK
Ghent and fourteen years after his sudden death in Dubrovnik, Belgian artist Trudo Engels (1962 – 2009) receives homage from Various Artists.

The group exhibition ACADEMIA is a compilation of new works that look back at key moments in Engels’ career and life but also reflect more generally on art education, the art world, and the position of the artist in society.

Using all kinds of materials and forms, Various Artists invites visitors to have hypersensory experiences through artworks that raise questions about pressing survival-related desires, the viral competitive drive between makers, and the growing impact of artificial intelligence in creative processes.

Photographs by Isabelle Arthuis

i/ There/Here, VA.MABINTOMA (keb.Pearl), 2023, mail art

There/Here is an anonymous letter sent to Belgian art- scene players from the 1980s as an invitation card for the exhibition. There/Here is an attempt to poetically bridge present and past, a time when mailing was a common form of exchange. It is also one of the two hidden artworks in the exhibition.

In the envelope, recipients find a solar-printed pink sheet of tissue paper with the sentences Wish you were here and She’s not there, translated into Farsi, a language Various Artists is learning as a way to be challenged by a non-Western poetic thinking. The only hint that might remind recipients of the show’s location is the stamp depicting a small AI-generated image of Louis Cloquet’s Clinical and Polyclinic Institute from 1905.

r/ Where Is My Education? VA.LIBSUF (ki.Pearl), 2022 – 23, dictionary and cut-outs

Where Is My Education? is a performance work maintained daily in bed, between 4 and 8 am, and involving sweatshop-like labor. The creation process begins with Tatar translation of the English sentence Where is my education? Tatar is a Crimean language that Various Artists has not mastered. Instead, they blindly create new poetic works by Google- translating the Tatar phrase into each of the 130+ languages Google offers, from Zulu to Afrikaans. Various Artists repeats the process a hundred times to create as many eroded versions as possible of the original sentence to (re)generate multiple meanings.

Where Is My Education? explores exhaustion—that of the artists exploiting themselves and that of the viewers overloaded with content. It is presented in two different ways in the exhibition: as cuttings covering the windows and as a small pocket dictio- nary presented in the office space and available for purchase.

z/ déCéresCéres, VA.HTHLTEZOOOMA (GOOG.zak), 1982 – 2023 Trudo Engels’ archive 1982–94, aquariums, wax, lamps

déCéresCéres is a reactivation of the audiovisual archive of the late Trudo Engels (1962 – 2009), presented in three glass containers filled with paraffin. Heat from electric lightbulbs melts the paraffin daily and exposes the containers’ content. Inspiration for déCéresCéres specifically came about when artist Shervin Kianersi Haghighi approached Various Artists to propose the performative destruction of some works by Various Artists. This resulted in the show If This Then That at n0dine in Brussels in April–May 2022. Haghighi’s refreshing practice led Various Artists to question the dusty Western approach to heritage and archiving. Could younger generations better benefit from artists’ archives if they were treated as living and evolving beings?

h/ Dear Various, VA.MABZOODEPOMA (GOOG.zey), 2022 – 23 De Witte Raaf #222, ceramics

Dear Various is a compilation of emails received by Various Artists from academia.edu, a for-profit organization storing over 40 million academic papers by more than 12 million researchers around the world, every time “Various Artists” is mentioned in online academic publications.

Dear Various is a series of 100 uniples (unique multiples).

To create the works Various Artists uses clay, a material used to compile and share information in Mesopotamia at the very beginning of writing’s history. Clay is known to be a highly durable material that can survive nuclear disasters. Simultaneously, the compilation of all the emails is collapsed into a single blurred image to be advertised in the 222nd edition of the art newspaper De Witte Raaf, issued in March 2023. Presented on the wall next to the clay tablets, the printed advertisement also serves as wrapping paper and as a certificate for the tablets available for purchase.

b/ ens.Pearl, VA.HTHLIB (pi.Pearl), 2023: glass, human clay, nerve cells, silicon, wood, paint

ens.Pearl came about through a self-restriction adopted by one of the Various Artists, Morice de Lisle, who decided to stop using toilets in a conventional way. Thus the artist’s body is used as a tool to produce an artwork. ens.Pearl is made of framed dried human clay and residue of natural pearls, preserved behind silicone-sealed glass. The work explores various notions of value: monetary value, exchange value, symbolic value, use value, and the value of art and exhibition.

D/ Rad/Neg, VA.MAQBOB (HM.huey), 1983 – 2023 engraved betonplex, Tour de France’s data, endless drawing

Rad/Neg is an exercise in abstract art reflecting Various Artists’ obsession with human-generated data. A circular representation of the ranking of the cyclists of the 2020 iteration of the Tour de France has been engraved on betonplex panels after after being scattered through cuts and a great variety of drawing techniques.

Various Artists’ initial interest in the Tour de France stems from the father of Trudo Engels, Valère, a feverish bicycle fan and wood carver who died in 1994.
The collective’s passion for “human mathematics” derives from one of Trudo Engels’ teachers at KASK, Werner Cuvelier, who taught the beauty of abstraction intertwined with collected coded information.

In Various Artists’ works, the predictability of formula- driven mathematical arts and the explanatory aspects of infographics are neutralized as new forms of data abstraction.

f/ Burdako, VA.HTHMAQLIB (HM.ber), 1980 – 2023 nylon and thread, wood

Burdako is a series of eight pieces of clothing made of stockings, based on sections of a magazine from the 1980s, Burda, which contain instructions for making clothes at home. At the academy Trudo Engels presented a paper copy of his father’s wedding suit with patterns used by his mother, who made clothes for a living. Burdako is a contemporary tribute to the famous story of a proud, foolish emperor who walked around naked after being fooled about a fake invisible gown that only smart people could see.

k/ Holy Grid, VA.ALL (GOOG.eyi, per.Pearl, HM.baz, ACG.pi) 2015 – 23, silk, spreadsheet

Through fifteen printed wall-hangings, Holy Grid presents an overview of all the works produced by Various Artists over the past twelve years, since its first show in January 2011 at Plateau in Brussels. Holy Grid maps the collaborative traffic of the twenty-four Various Artists: the complex interrelations demon- strate the overlapping interests and the diversity of their oeuvre. The work’s initial title, Four Seasons, refers to the four main themes Various Artists has explored across different works since its show with artist Cildo Meireles in 2015 at Galleria Continua in San Gimignano: water, mathematics, shit, and value.

p/ THSHNNG/THMRC, VA.CXMZOO (HM.bi), 2018 – 23 video, soundtrack, NFTs

THSHNNG/THMRC begins with two movies that Various Artists saw in the 1980s as students and which left a lasting impression: The Shining by Stanley Kubrick (1980) and Themroc by Claude Faraldo (1973). For THSHNNG/THMRC, Various Artists took all stills from both movies and replaced every single pixel in each one of them: more than 100 billion pixel displacements. This digital pixel-level deconstruction is shown on two screens. The soundtracks of the two movies have been separated from their sources and altered to become sound pieces diffused by speakers. One hundred and thirty stills of THSHNNG were chosen to be minted as NFTs available on https:// opensea.io/collection/thshnng.

io/ Turing Test, VA.DIGZOOJKO (ko.Pearl), 2023: HI and AI, digital painting printed on paper

Named after computer pioneer Alan Turing, Turing is a double-sided work printed on cardboard the size of an LP cover. Although there seems to be hardly any difference between the two sides, each showing the self-portrait of a visual artist, one portrait was created by Various Artists using 222 collected human-made self-portraits (most of them paintings), while the portrait on the other side was generated by overlapping 222 machine-made portraits of curators based on the original 222 human-made self-portraits. Would you be able to tell which image was created by the algorithm written by Various Artists and which was created by the machine? In the exhibition, the portraits form the base for the cut-outs of Where Is My Education? Five hundred copies are available in the office to take away.

u/ Cacheko, VA.LTEDIG (GOOG.zua - HM.eyr), 1982 – 2023: AR

Cacheko is the second hidden work in the exhibition alongside There/Here. Cacheko is a copy of a student work by Trudo Engels, Radiation Negative (1982), executed in augmented reality.

ir/ eyeTV.blc, VA.LIBBOBDIG (po.Pearl), 2023: wax, metal

Like a dreamcatcher, eyeTV.blc is an eye-catching black sculpture or “TV” hung above the entrance/exit of the exhibition to guard the comings and goings of the visitors’ egos as well as those of the artists. eyeTV.blc sucks up visitors’ gazes and protects them from evil looks.

Thanks to Hans Andreas R., Isabelle Arthuis, Yehbonne Bien (for the exhibition texts), Christophe Bruneel, Edwin Carels (a.k.a. La drôlesse), Androuscha Claeyssens, Jesse Cremers, Sam De Graeve, Simon Delobel, Patricia Domingues, Jenifer Evans, Femke Florus, An Goovaerts, Loes Jacobs, Shervin Kianersi Haghigi, Frankie Langsdorf, Cildo Meireles, Thomas Peeters, Sara Plantefève- Castryck, Paulius Sliaupa, Eva Steenbakkers, Dajo Van den Bussche, Sam Van Ingelgem, Lien Van Leemput, Valerie Verhack, Amber Wynants, Claude Yande, and the whole team of KASK & CONSERVATORIUM School of Arts Ghent.