About this event
Book nowJos de Gruyter & Harald Thys have been working together as an artist duo since the end of the 1980s. Their photographs, drawings, objects, and videos—steeped in black humor, (self)-reflection and overlapping reality, fiction and suppressed history—play with notions of the superficial and banal. They will present their latest film and new book at WIELS on Saturday, October 11th at 19h.
Belgian premiere of Die aap van Bloemfontein, 2014
[The Ape from Bloemfontein]
Video, colour, sound, 23 min
Afrikaans spoken, English subtitles
Van wat kant dat ik myn leven aenzie, ik vind’et vol zonden. Sy komen my met menigten te voor, en vervult zynde van Schrik, keere ik my tot u, ô mynen Godt! weest tog my rampzalig mensch genadig. Doet my door boedtveerdige werken uwe verzoening verdienen: en laet niet toe, dat ik uwe bedienaers zou pramen, van my de teekenen van uwen vrede en liefde te geven, voor dat ik zal hebben getragt uwen toorn te verzoenen, en door de werken, die sy my zullen voorschryven, aen uwe regtveerdigheyt eenigsins zal hebben voldaen.
Gendt 1727
(Excerpt from the Dutch translation of a pedagogical treatise on the torment of human sin, written by Charles Gobinet.)
In conjunction with the launch of their book Das Wunder des Lebens
Like a pictorial encyclopedia, Das Wunder des Lebens contains over four hundred drawings that show all that the modern world has to offer, from maps and city views to cars and airplanes. However, unlike conventional pictorial dictionaries, there is no symbolic system. We see laundry bags and paint buckets as well as a nun and a man with a hat in front of a double window, a shy animal with a thick fur, and breakfast on a Victorian table. Juxtapositions are normalized, and normality becomes a farce. Everything is exposed to everyone; everything becomes equal.
Co-published with Kunsthalle Wien and Kunsthalle Basel on the occasion of the eponymous exhibition at the former, February 7 – May 4, 2014, and Projekt 13 at the latter, January 16 – March 14, 2010, in association with Sternberg Press, Berlin.
Design by Boy Vereecken with Antoine Begon.
October 2014, English/German
30 x 29 cm, 492 pages, 477 colour ill., hard cover
ISBN 978-3-943365-92-4
11.10.2014, 19:00
€ 3
In the presence of the artists