PRESS RELEASE

                                               Window Gallery:

                                               "Antwerp" (window intervention), Daniel Dewaele

                                               Basementspace:

                                               "Representations", Daniel Dewaele

                                                               Nocturne Opening 10 september 2009, from 6 to 9 pm
                                                                                 11 September - 17 October 2009

The work Daniel Dewaele intends to present for this exhibition consists of two parts.

First of all there is his intervention on the glass income doors of the gallery. On this doors he applies information from the registry office of the city of Antwerp. t bears upon an enumeration of all the inhabitants of Antwerp, immigrants (nationalities + numbers) and autochthons.

Visitors can read this information from the inside of the exhibition area. It gives us a clear idea of the composition of the Antwerp population. And above this, he presents us his language interventions in certain newspapers by exposing them on tables in the basement space. So there is for instance his 'Het Belang Limburg project'. On the front page of this paper a well-defined text is published during fifty successive days. Every day a different language is chosen, among which the Arabic, the Hebrew, the Thai and the Urdu.

In addition, and during these very fifty days, a different interview, with over and over again a different citizen whose mother tongue corresponds time and time again with the language of the text on the front page, is printed off in Dutch.     His language interventions didn't only appear in 'Het Belang van Limburg' (2002) ,  but also in 'De Witte Raaf' (2004), the train paper 'Metro' (2002) the 'Brugs Handelsblad' (2002) and the  art periodical  (H) Art (2008). These language interventions are typical for his artistic practices of the last years.

The totality of his oeuvre is generally seen as institutional-critical. It is not his intention however to break contact with the institutions. On the contrary, he wants to introduce into these institutions an activity that doesn't belong to the valid artistic practices.

He is neither a painter nor a sculptor. He rather thinks as a sociologist or an anthropologist. All this results in an oeuvre that behaves like an intruder within the institutions. He presents renewed interpretations of what art also can be.  With the totality of the oeuvre  that he has in mind for the gallery, he focuses our eyes on the outside. He not only show us the demographic composition of Antwerp, but with his interventions in papers and magazines he also involves  linguistic minorities belonging to the Antwerp community.