2009 /
Netherworld - Cruising Netwerk 2009 /
installation
Yvan Derwéduwé makes work that positions itself fully upon daily life.
In Binary Moment (2005), the access to the exhibition space was regulated by automatic door pumps. With varying intervals, the doors opened and closed according to a pre-figured logic, which was as arbitrary as it seemed provocative. As a result the audience had their
passage occasionally halted in awkward bunches. The intervention could be described as a bold social and poetic reflection, not in the least
because there are so many areas where the movements of an individual are based according to a binary logic of "in" and "out".
In 2003 Derwéduwé concentrated on the dark side of the Citadel Park in Ghent, a location known for homosexual escapades. The artist made a night-time transformation of the park upon canvas in the form of an alternative map under which hot spots were lit up in black light, as a reference to the more confidential codes of the nightly Netherworld. For his exhibition in Network he re-works the transgressive and sometimes voyeuristic aspects of his former research in four new interventions. Remarkably trivial elements of reality (a toilet, the flickering light of a tube, a computer game...) are included in a setting full of potential references. Each element plays an intensified - not to say aesthetic - experience of reality, a two-sided phenomenon that reveals plastic as well as coital connotations. (Text Bram Van Damme).
For this exhibition the following works were on display:
"Cruising Netwerk 2009" is an exact, bronze replica of the urinals at Netwerk. While the exterior, polished and shined every day, is glowing attractively, the interior, never cleaned, is corroded by the acidity of the vistors' urine leaving green marks inside. The panels left and right
of this urinal are removed, so visitors can have a clear look at this shiny specimen.
"Zipper" is a video showing the reflection of a TV-screen on the ceiling of a bedroom. There are two versions of this work, one fast flicking
through channels with, as a result, fast color changes on the ceiling and short audio fragments. The second a slower version, which follows a
whole episode of the Flemish soap 'Thuis'.
"Netherworld/installation": different colored and shaped lids form an imaginary world.
"Netherworld/animation" is an animation of the nightlife in a park. You see figures walking around, disappearing in and reappearing from the
bushes. Until you're lured into the bushes yourself... (in cooperation with Nico Strobbe)