SUPPORT AS SUPPOSED

STUKCAFÉ
16 SEP - 14 NOV

FREE

OPENING HOURS
Mo - Fr 11:00 - 2:00
Sa - Su 14:00 - 2:00

Exceptions
Mo 01.11 17:00 - 2:00
Th 04.11 - zo 7.11: 10:00 - 2:00 (Rode Hond)

Installation shots © Jan Duerinck - watch the full series via this link

In the context of this solo exhibition by Jan Duerinck,
Oriana Lemmens wrote this text.

For if one is standing in front of a closed door - It’s not difficult to
browse the internet and find a guideline on how to open a key-closed door
and, likewise, it is not hard to ignore the mandatory sentence we read at
the beginning of these directions: ‘Only open locks which belong to you,
or ones you have been given express permission to open’.

What you’ll read here is - obviously - not an introduction to the ‘art of
lock picking’ as it’s only logic to understand that the guideline has by
no means the intention to explain what will be revealed when the lock
surrenders itself to its intruder: It just isn’t important to know what we’ll
find on the other side of the wall.

But how to approach a work of art that, at first glance, does not seem to
give an indication of the meaning of its existence? To permeate the im-
permeable, we will have to make use of the only thing, the only object in
our access: a hairpin.

Those who still have difficulties containing their curiosity will close
one eye and peek with the other through the keyhole to get an idea of
what lies behind, yet, they will merely get a vague and confined image of
a spectrum. Another way not to seem ‘desperate-to-know’ is to resist the
dive (deep deep dive) into a symbolical interpretation of this seemingly
small and futile tool, as it will tell us nothing about the way to handle
it best and, finally, to click the lock.

The/A solution here could be a delineation of the object’s ordinary nature
as art gives us the capacity to traverse materialities. The formal existence
of this pin, with its characteristic 180-degree bend after which the curves
in mountain roads are called, is determined by its purpose, its function to
fix, to attach, to model.

What if a form is repeated, the same, but different? Fluctuating its usabil-
ity, scale, pliability - balancing between the functional and the ornamen-
tal? How far can you go from the object’s original mold to the point in
which the object’s conceptual meaning completely changes? What about
the idea of space in relation to the attached and the unattached? And does
it all end when the hairpin becomes a wall
itself: a concrete, impervious, almost conceptual caricature?

We wonder – repeatedly pinning, deforming, and fiddling the lock, but
then realize, only when it is silent you can hear the pin drop.