Chris Dercon on Jef Geys
On Tuesday 8 October 2013, Chris Dercon will lead a tour of the Jef Geys exhibition at Cubitt, London, and for the duration of the exhibition Afterall journal articles discussing Gey’s work will be freely available online.
Chris Dercon is Director of Tate Modern and was formerly Director of Witte de With, Rotterdam, during which time he commissioned Geys’s project What are we having for dinner tonight? (1993). Geys’s new commission for Cubitt is a partner work to this project, in which he organised a number of live broadcasts on a local television station of different households eating their evening meal. The project was commissioned in association with the Fifth Architecture Biennale of Rotterdam, whose theme was the postwar residential areas built in Rotterdam’s Alexanderpolder neighborhood and functioned as a riposte to the abstract authority with which architects and local administrations tend to conceptualise the urban environment.
The Summer 2011 issue of Afterall journal focused on Jef Geys. In ‘Jef Geys’s Art-Making Ethics’Chris Sharp reflected upon Geys dedication to the question of art’s social usefulness, suggesting he is a democratic artist par excellence; and in ‘The Really Ignorant Schoolmaster: Jef Geys, Amongst Many Others’ Dieter Roelstraete discussed his highly localised practice and the manner in which he has used his experience as a schoolteacher to cloud the difference between ‘amateur’ and ‘professional’.
To mark the new commission by Jef Geys currently at Cubitt, London these articles will be available to read online for the duration of the exhibition.
Jef Geys tour by Chris Dercon
Tuesday 8 October, 19:00
Cubitt
8 Angel Mews
London
N1 9HH
Free admission.
Jef Geys solo exhibition is at Cubitt until 13 October 2013. The Cubitt events program will also include a Dirk Snauwaert talk on the activities of Bar 900 on Tuesday 24 September. For more information visit the Cubitt website.
The Chris Dercon tour is an Afterall and Central Saint Martins MRes Art: Exhibition Studiesevent, presented in partnership with Cubitt, London.
Image: Jef Geys, Brieven aan Roger — Kempens Informatieblad (Letter to Roger — Kempens Informatieblad), n.d., newspaper. Collection of the Flemish Community on loan to S.M.A.K., Ghent. Courtesy the artist and SMAK