Arts Centre Vooruit, Ghent, Belgium

Michel de Broin was born in Montreal in 1970 and currently lives in Berlin.
He lets his art collide with daily life in a playful, paradoxical and critical manner. He likes to think up solutions that aren’t really, or gives new life to existing objects. His work is full of symbolism referring to social, political and ecological (power) systems. His erroneous solutions lead to a stimulating clash between utopias and modern city life. What to make of a car that is fuelled by the fat of its driver (good for the environment and a solution for the obesity epidemic)? His work was previously exhibited in Canada, the US and Europe, and can now be admired in Ghent for the first time.

In 2007 de Broin won the Sobey Art Award, a prominent Canadian art prize, for the sculptures Black Hole Conference (27 chairs mounted in a sphere) and Revolutions (a stairway in a knot). The jury praised him for his “highly individual, inventive and original” works that “through paradox and inversion, [turn] systems against themselves”. The Broin on his work; “I twist this symbol into a knot that speaks against what this symbol means. Stairs are a symbol of progress, of linear onward and upward, but in the knot they become a continuous circuit.In the 18th century, we thought that progress would always continue, that things would always get better. And now we know that there is progress, but also regression; things go up but they also go down. (…) So activism is also important when there’s a problematic issue. But my job is to make art. And I think art can transform.”

Especially for the game is up, De Broin will make a new work, Shelter. He will make a post-catastrophe shelter with 36 old Vooruit tables. The legs of the tables will point outwards in order to guard the impenetrable interior of the sculpture against the continuous threat of the outside world. Not only does he recycle existing material to create a piece of art, the piece also represents the threat of an impending catastrophe.

The exhibition will also include three existing works by de Broin: the sculpture Dead star and the video diptych Shared Propulsion Car and Keep On Smoking. Dead Star is an asteroid made from empty batteries. The precious energy they once had in them has been used, their value diminished. The work is a confrontation with today’s squandering and the transience of our energy sources. Shared Propulsion Car is a video work that shows de Broin cruising through the city with a car of which only the bodywork remains. The engine has been removed and replaced by pedals with which the driver and the passengers move the car along. When de Broin took to the streets of Toronto with this vehicle, he was arrested by the police. In Keep on Smoking we see de Broin riding a bike that generates smoke: by pedaling, you produce the kinetic energy required to power a smoke machine.

http://micheldebroin.org