Ives Maes

Lambda-print on acrylic

100 x 100 cm

Edition of 5

2004

Content

Tourism confronts the average culture consumer, burdened with all sorts of guilt feelings, with at least two ironic side effects of the globalisation as political horizon of Maes’ project: on the one hand a hard to avoid feeling that the contemporary art tourism organized around biennial economics often looks like an ennobled kind of disaster tourism. And on the other hand the painful association of the refugee with the Deleuzian concept of ‘nomadology’ as a popular intellectual metaphor for this condition of globalisation. On a website a trip to the refugee camp of your dreams can be booked. Who accepts the challenge has already deserved a place in the art history books: he or she has imbued the logic of relational aesthetics – one of the most dominant art movements of the last decennium, that often displayed an astonishing naïve believe in the politically transformative powers of art – until it’s ultimate, radical conclusion.

Excerpt from the text ‘Lonely at the top#5’ by Dieter Roelstraete, 2007

PROJECT

With his RECYCLABLE REFUGEE CAMP project, Ives Maes probed the derailment of contemporary hyper-ethics. His latrines, wells, shelters and coffins, fabricated in a natural resin, raise ethics to a manic state. The Recyclable Refugee Camp tackles the ethical imperative that encourages art to intervene in the world, localizing the epicenter of a new utopia inside the boundaries of the art world itself.

Excerpt from the text ‘An economy of truth’ by Wim Peeters, published in Flash Art nr. 235, 2004

EXHIBITION

Tourism

03one Art Space, Belgrade, Serbia

13/08/07 – 18/09/07

Curated by Marko Stamenkovic

Solo exhibition

 

Tourism

MuHKA Museum of Contemporary Art, Antwerp, Belgium

28/10/07 – 06/01/08

Curated by Dieter Roelstraete

Solo exhibition

 

Transient Spaces – The Tourist Syndrome

NGBK, Berlin, Germany

28/08/10 – 10/10/10

Curated by Marina Sorbello & Antje Weitzel

Isa Andreu & Timothy Moore, Alex Auriema, Federico Baronello, Ursula Biemann, Aslı Çavuşoğlu, Raphaël Cuomo & Maria Iorio, Carsten Does & Gerda Heck, G-Lab, Daniel Gontz, Sandra Hetzl, Bettina Hutschek, J&K, Thomas Kilpper, Sara Kolster & Suzanne Valkenburg & Eefje Blankevoort, Emanuel Licha, Ives Maes, Plinio Avila Marquez, Eléonore de Montesquiou, Christoph Oertli, Joanne Richardson & David Rych, Romana Schmalisch, Société Réaliste, Pilvi Takala, Eugenio Tibaldi, Oraib Toukan