Bart Verschaffel – Terrible Images. On the Representation of the Worst

In this essay Verschaffel explores the representation of ‘the worst’. He draws a distinction between images showing the ‘worst’ as a mere fact and images that make us conscious of the reality of the worst. He argues that the worst can be easily represented but that the real question is how to represent the fact ‘that it really happens’. Verschaffel elaborates on this question by turning to Barthes’s book on photography La Chambre Claire, criticising his assertion that images touch us through a ‘realness’ that situates itself outside of the construction of the image.

Roland Barthes – Images – Photography – The Worst

Paul De Vylder – A Panic Horror

This essay explores the concept of panic and its relation to the history of normalisation and discipline in European civilization – from the French Revolution to the Nazi regime and our own neoliberal times. De Vylder makes clear that today the mechanisms of normalisation and the terror of the Nazi regime have become invisible and interiorised, while ‘panic’ is becoming medicalised and criminalised.

Fascism – French Revolution – Neoliberalism – Panic

Koen Brams & Dirk Pültau – Interviews with Marc Schepers, Luc Tuymans and Paul De Vylder

These three interviews deal with artists and critics that were connected to the Antwerp alternative space Ruimte Morguen and have been dealing with ‘terrible images’ (of the Holocaust, etc…). The interview with Marc Schepers – initiator of Ruimte Morguen – deals both with his own work and with some of the exhibitions organised in Ruimte Morguen during the first two years of its existence (1982-1983). With Luc Tuymans Brams and Pültau focus on his strategies in dealing with the Holocaust. A brief interview with Paul De Vylder concerns his involvement in one particular exhibition in Ruimte Morguen in which drawings made by Belgian artist Wilchar were shown, made shortly after his liberation from the concentration camp Breendonk.

Ruimte Morguen – Paul De Vylder – Marc Schepers – Luc Tuymans – Holocaust – Fascism

Marc De Kesel – ‘Oh sorry Sir, I had forgotten you’. On Germaine Tillion’s Le Verfügbar aux enfers

De Kesel reflects on Le Verfügbar aux enfers, an operetta written in 1944 by Germaine Tillion while she was imprisoned in the concentration camp Ravensbrück.

Germaine Tillion – Holocaust

Dominiek Hoens – ‘Que le monde aille à sa perte, c’est la seule politique.’ In Marguerite Duras’ dark room

This essay discusses Duras’s views on cinema. It commences with the film Le camion (1977) and, more specifically with one sentence in particular: ‘Que le monde aille à sa perte, c’est la seule politique.’ [Let the world be lost, that's the only politics.]

Marguerite Duras – Hiroshima – the ‘worst’

Dirk Lauwaert – The Not-Healthy-Anymore-Man

In this piece Lauwaert reflects on disease, sickness and the medical world. The author has for many years suffered from a brain tumour. He reflects on the discourse of the medical world and the incapability of doctors to deal with their ‘objects’ (i.e. the patients) as human individuals – as subjects – an incapacity with which he now has long experience.

Disease – Medical science

Daniël Robberechts – Diary, 1-23 January 1970

The journal presents an excerpt from the diary of Flemish author Daniël Robberechts.

Flemish literature – Daniël Robberechts (1937-1992)

Koen Brams & Dirk Pültau – ‘If you do not want to be how some think you should be, how can you be?’. The Beginning of an Artistic Calling: A conversation with Alice De Mont 

This is the second in what may become a series of conversations in which (relatively) young artists are interviewed about their first works. Alice De Mont (°1985) lives and works in Ghent. Her first solo show will take place in June in the Galerie Dohyang Lee, Paris.

Koen Brams & Dirk Pültau – G 58 Hessenhuis

The authors offer a critique of a series of five exhibitions held in the M HKA, Antwerp’s museum of contemporary art, staged from 10 February 2011 until 10 February 2012.

M HKA – G 58 Hessenhuis (artist’s association 1958-1962)