M HKA gaat digitaal

Met M HKA Ensembles zetten we onze eerste échte stappen in het digitale landschap. Ons doel is met behulp van nieuwe media de kunstwerken nog beter te kaderen dan we tot nu toe hebben kunnen doen.

We geven momenteel prioriteit aan smartphones en tablets, m.a.w. de in-museum-ervaring. Maar we zijn evenzeer hard aan het werk aan een veelzijdige desktop-versie. Tot het zover is vind je hier deze tussenversie.

M HKA goes digital

Embracing the possibilities of new media, M HKA is making a particular effort to share its knowledge and give art the framework it deserves.

We are currently focusing on the experience in the museum with this application for smartphones and tablets. In the future this will also lead to a versatile desktop version, which is now still in its construction phase.

Extra Terrestrial (Shadow of an Extraterrestrial Man), 1976

Photography

Collection: Collection M HKA, Antwerp (Inv. no. UFO_0098).

James Lee Byars was intensely occupied with raising philosophical questions and addressing them in his work, but without ever providing any pat answers. In works such as Extra Terrestrial, also known as The Antwerp Giant, he does however provide viewers with a few suggestions. This piece is inspired by the Antwerp folk-legend, the giant called Lange Wapper. Byars represents him as an endlessly long, primitive human figure in black tulle. In something of a ritual during the opening of his 1976 exhibition at Antwerp’s Internationaal Cultureel Centrum, he had those present help unfurl the transparent dark figure on the Meir (the adjacent thoroughfare). W. Van Mulders described this act as a procession where the participating public warily unfolded the black tulle like an immense reliquary. Afterwards, the giant was included in the ‘inside’ exhibition as an airy black mass.

The act of unfolding, in the presence of the public, was essential for Byars. It was only during this act that the ‘Antwerp Giant’ really became present again. Once back in the exhibition, the viewer is again consigned to a certain distance, and what remains is a pile of black tulle. Byars was fascinated by paradoxes: the giant versus a mass of black cloth, the material quality of the tulle versus the immateriality of the Lange Wapper folk-figure. The artist admired enduring continuity and immutability, but his works tended to go ‘lost’ (among other reasons, due to the fragility of materials used) or remain to us only as fragments of their former selves.

Add to your list

Artist

> James Lee Byars.

Exhibitions & Ensembles

> Exhibition: EXTRA MUROS: Visite Bornem - Gedeelde Ruimte. CC Ter Dilft, Bornem, 03 May 2014 - 25 May 2014.

> Exhibition: The collection XXXIII – The Collection as a Character. M HKA, Antwerpen, 07 June 2013 - 22 September 2013.

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> Ensemble: M HKA_DEFAULT_WORKS.

> Ensemble: NUCLEUS.

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> Ensemble: Shadow of an Extraterrestrial Man.

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> Ensemble: An Architecture for Art - James Lee Byars.

Related Items

>James Lee Byars, The Shadow of an Extraterrestrial Man/The Antwerp Giant, 1976.Installation, black tulle, 17 x 245 m.