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STAND 

NEXT PROJECT: AT ART ROTTERDAM, THE NETHERLANDS, 5-8 FEBRUARY 2009

For 3 days in September, Ostend will see 3 gallerists and 30 artists occupying a space in a context out of sync with todays rushed art world. Commandeering the derelict Art Nouveau Villa la Tourelle, their very presence reawakens the 19th century bleary-eyed optimism of Ostend's mad holidaying kings and feisty dilettantes. 

In the first of a series of artistic interventions, STAND will make a virtue of hybridity across conventional modes of exhibition making, blurring the boundaries  of curated projects, gallery exhibitions and art fairs while highlighting connections between individual works. Artists and curators have unapologetically appropriated this city, twisting a dangerous and seductive quality out of a place which, even 20 years ago Marvin Gaye described as 'a beat back in tempo'.

In the bleak, blank but still beautiful rooms of the villa, last century's weekend-long revelries are for a moment stirred by today's more urgent and informed crowd. It is not into the building's grand, green windowed entrance we arrive but to the right of it, a miniscule door which creeps us down into the basement. Curiouser and curiouser, the dilapidated room we enter is not the vaulted corridors down which servants once bustled packages but a 1970s madman's attempt at modernisation. Tiled floored rooms have been interrupted by metal studded partitions with portholes to peer though. Encircled within, we are met with the first desolate, inky silently moving images of STAND's incumbency, while to either side of the basement bereft wine cellars are reanimated by miniature wax reliefs. 

The placing of work in these unprepared surrounds elbows long finished discussions, antics and dramas played out within the house's walls into a state of alertness, reawakening and joining these strange intrusions. Outside in the garden a demented man's voice desperately seeking it's companion sounds from an abandoned military tent; as you move into the house whitewash puzzles at the invasion of a black, shiny devastation of a tree; the 1970s bathroom is put to topsy-turvy toil, serving oysters from the bathtub which is itself the front row to a tiled black & white cinema; and, housed in the topmost turret of the house, a hive of bees busily flickers its instinctive dance in lights as, across rooftops the seafront lights of Ostend equally instinctually blink back. 

The leaves crunching underfoot and the repetitive greyness of the sea seem swollen with endeavour in light of the ideas, aspirations and shellfish housed for a weekend in Belgium's Ostend. For a moment a slumbering past lends its voice to today's visions of tomorrow but, when these three days are up and the moment over, everyone goes home, the house returns to its sedentry state, secreting the weekend's carousal up with the rest of its ghosts.

Exhibiting artists include: Mathieu Kleyebe Abonnenc, Ailbhe Ni Bhriain, Veronica Brovall, Martin Clark, Yves Coussement, Bart De Clerq, Lucas Devriendt, Simona Denicolai & Ivo Provost, Ger van Elk, Anneke Eussen, Pieterjan Ginckels, Assaf Gruber, Christopher Hanlon, Ron Haselden, Marin Kasimir, Niek Kemps, Fransje Killaars, Ansel Krut, Jeffrey TY Lee, Katrine Modegaard, Jochen Muehlenbrink, Lucy Pawlak, Sian Pile, Felicity Powell, Miho Sato, John Timberlake, Curdin Tones, Mhairi Vari, Anne Wenzel.  

Iphgenia Baal, London September 2008