Artist Talk

Mircea Cantor (°1977, RO) is a Romanian-born contemporary visual artist, based in Paris. His multidisciplinary practice is first and foremost to be understood in terms of (a quest for) visual poetry, meditation and spirituality. Throughout his work, motives such knots and ropes but also fingerprints, florals, flags, airplanes, and angels, are recurrent, resulting in a closely knit and rhizomatic oeuvre. In this artist talk, Cantor enters into dialogue with curator Karen Verschooren about his solo exhibition in STUK, Am I Really Free?. This first overview exhibition of Cantor’s work in Belgium presents a careful selection of films, photography and drawings that allow us to reflect upon the freedom of our movements in space, the practice of tracking and tracing, ideas of borders and limitations, and the courageous and sometimes audacious attempt to subvert them.

Siemen Van Gaubergen is a Belgian visual artist, residing in the Cas-co studios in Leuven since 2018. In his practice, he investigates contemporary visual culture and the way in which we understand images. Narratives of all kind form the multilayered background against which his images take shape. In the creation of his work, he additionally makes use of existing or newly created photographs, videostills, instruction sheets, language and graphic signs. The result is often complex, and demands to be viewed and reviewed, deciphered. In his lecture, Van Gaubergen will elaborate on his practice on the occasion of his solo exhibition at STUK.