Series 9 / EAST ENDERS
Expo opening 27 November 2022 at 3 pm in Cultuurcentrum Hasselt
For EAST ENDERS, I travelled to Estonia, Lithuania & Latvia in search of imagined impressions. During this expo, they present this new work for the first time. It is a series in search of the story beyond the narrative.
"Koen Broos is all about showing us the world as it is when we are not looking; when we fold our eyelashes in front of our pupils and knead the outside world through a narrow cavern without touching it. That we look away flat-eyed and therefore see better; think we see better or want to see better what we desire. That our slanted eye corners and our dampened retinas will tell us more than a high-resolution scan of the world in microscopic pixels. That we may suspect what is, has just been or is yet to come. That you never know for sure what is before you before you have un-seen it. Likewise, the Estonian poet Jaan Kaplinksi doubts what is now east and west, where he is now again, in this second or in over there room, and which pixels and shadows suggest something of a border or an enclave."
Gerry the mol 2022
EAST ENDERS translates the thematics of transition and imaging to so-called Eastern Europe. Or should we stick to former Eastern Europe, given that there is only one Europe?
Historically, we could say that Eastern Europe disappeared under the bricks of the Berlin Wall. One night literally hammer and chisel and East and West had become non-utilitarian concepts. Or, it seemed so anyway. For a decade, cultural-historical differences were eagerly absorbed into European expansion and there seemed little offense. On the contrary, during the first decade of the 21st century, European internal evolution was completely overshadowed by global terror and war. From 2010, with the financial crisis, the gaze was turned back inside Europe, but then the schism turned out to be north-south rather than east-west oriented. The Greek financial crisis, the dire Italian crisis and, in the slipstream, suspicion against Portugal and Spain put the split on edge: the austere north versus the south, areas of impoverishment, fraud and profligacy. But an old scar remains a scar. Pretty soon, in the 2010-2020 period, east-west issues resurfaced: Hungary, Poland, Slovakia, Belarus and now, as a sad climax, Ukraine.
EAST ENDERS is thus about TRANSITION and about the fixed image.
Expo East enders,
together with Sébastien Cuvelier, Lieven Gouwy, Annika Haas & Koen Broos
From 27 November 2022 to 1 April 2023
Be welcome to the opening opening Sun 27 Nov 2022 at 3pm,
afterwards Tuesday to Saterday from 1 to 5 p.m. Hasselt cultural centre, Kunstlaan 5, B-3500 Hasselt
