Seven Highlights from This Year’s Art Brussels

The booth of Swedish gallery Wetterling featured three photographs by Crimean-born provocateur Nathalia Edenmont, including A Moment Like This. Featuring a radiant woman wearing a headpiece and gown, the ensemble comprising exclusively fresh flowers, the image may look on the surface like simply a pretty photo. But peeling back each layer reveals new complexity—a female frozen in time at what most societies would consider her peak beauty, her peak moment of fertility; such are the flowers. It’s difficult not to conjure up the flora-applicable vocabulary we use for young women—fresh beauty, in full bloom, wilted, biological clock—and this photograph displays some of Edenmont’s most frequent themes: femininity, fertility, infertility, death, life, beauty, and time.

The Hong Kong gallery’s booth exclusively featured works by Vietnamese artist Bùi Công Khánh. Curated to look like a traditional domestic room, this mini-exhibit explored the Vietnam War from a Vietnamese perspective. It opened up a dialogue about the northern and southern divide, which reverberates over four decades later, and how external forces influenced the nation’s cataclysm. Two hand-painted porcelain vases stood out in their enormous size and intricate detailing, one representing the north, one the south. Their decorations included barbed wire and wartime paraphernalia relevant to each side; for instance, United States-issued military helmets. Khánh’s artistic exploration of a little-explored subject offered a unique historical highlight.

An exciting new presence at Art Brussels, and in general, was nomadic gallery Ballon Rouge Collective. As part of the bright pink booth, BRC showcased a series of enigmatic prints, each within a wrapping of reflective plastic, by Belgian artist Philip Janssens. As the viewer moves closer, attempting to examine each of the sculptural faces, their own reflection comes into sight—forcing viewers to first look upon themselves before they can find meaning in the work or decipher to whom these faces belong. Janssens’s work provided a bit of unexpected humor to the fair.

The full-booth installation by Czech multimedia artist Barbora Kleinhamplova featured films running alongside found objects from those films, for an immersive experience that blurred the lines between fiction and reality. Thematically, the artworks use the metaphor of passengers on a boat to portray neoliberalism as illness. Instead of sailing the open ocean in freedom and contentment, passengers find themselves seasick and demoralized, unable to sleep, seeking a cure in fabricated medicine. As an artist, Kleinhamplova is willing to forgo aesthetics in favor of an experience because while it’s difficult to watch people pale and vomiting, it’s more difficult to look away from what could be your own already-infected reflection.

The three paintings that constitute Kim Ho-Deuk’s Waterfall series provided a welcome, serene ode to the natural world, and a fantastic contemporary take on traditional East Asian abstract art. Each installment features a white canvas with three black brush strokes that mimic the energy of a waterfall without depicting a cascading body of water in actuality. To create his works, the Korean artist contemplates the essence of his choice subject for anywhere from an entire day to a few months or even a few years. The act of painting takes him only a few minutes.

Istanbul-based 3D artist Kerem Ozan Bayraktar's solo booth at Sanatorium Gallery took NASA’s recent catalogue of potentially habitable planets with an Earth-like atmosphere and turned the idea on its head. Bayraktar used NASA’s data to create a visual interpretation of these new worlds, commenting on the findings' true subjective nature and how disingenuous it is to apply human-centric modes of thinking to scientific research. The thematic connection of his work for Sanatorium, the artist explained, is the idea of “going somewhere,” or more specifically, “forced migration.”

For her “untitled” pieces, French artist Cathryn Boch manipulates paper maps with hand sewing, creating sculptural topography. Boch’s work evolves with resonant world events, but the fragility of each piece speaks to the modern world’s tenuous, often ephemeral borders. The addition of texture, as well as new drawn-in pieces, makes for a distinct presentation, and viewers can interpret the story of each map for themselves.