C L E A R I N G and Mendes Wood DM are presenting a joint gallery exhibition by Neïl Beloufa
Brussels' galleries C L E A R I N G and Mendes Wood DM are presenting a joint exhibition by French-Algerian artist Neïl Beloufa.
Beloufa is one the most powerful voices of the generation of artists born in the 1980s. His artistic research focuses on contemporary society and on how it is represented and mediated by digital interaction, often with the aim of exposing the control mechanisms.
The exhibition is a partnership between C L E A R I N G, Mendes Wood DM and ebb.global; a new digital community and laboratory emerging from Neïl Beloufa's studio and production company. ebb.global is a Distributed Organization (DO) that develops Web3 cultural projects through physical exhibitions and online experiments.
Through this project, the exhibition and an online community of agents and invested collectors, will welcome visitors to play games and be part of the content production and dissemination. The installations, robots, films and animated paintings, all influenced by Beloufa's characteristic humour and wit, will give view into the ways the physical and digital in our lives have become interdependent; now dancing in lockstep.
Through two bodies of work, Remotely Speaking and Screen-Talk, the visitor will encounter artworks compelling about being stuck in freeports and online viewing rooms, to the stock market's speculative influence over the planet's future, and the spin-doctor mediatization of the pandemic. With the legacy world and its systems on life support, artists developing Web3 communities, NFT's and Distributed Organizations, are showing windows of possibilities towards new cultural models that will continue to support critical production, and provide integrated immersive and interactive engagement for audiences, collectors and supporters.
Neïl Beloufa: Remotely speaking
22 January - 5 March 2022
Mendes Wood DM
Neïl Beloufa: Pandemic pandemonium
29 January - 10 April 2022
C L E A R I N G
Neïl Beloufa
The multi-layered practice of French-Algerian artist, Neïl Beloufa occupies the space between various dichotomies. Reality and fiction, cause and effect, presence and absence are the polarities between which the artist’s work begins to take form. Developing his reflection on these by combining various media, including sculpture, video and painting into single installations, Beloufa masterly manages to deconstruct our contemporary systems of belief by moving between the real and the imaginative.
Situating himself between these polarities, Beloufa’s practice is deeply reflective. Examining established structures of power, incidentally, those within the “creative economy”, whilst dwelling on the authority that is afforded by artists in today’s society, Beloufa eliminates his dominant role by awarding agency to actors or materials, informing one another and coexisting in installations as though they are actors and props on a set.Rejecting the alias of sculptor, or any alignment to a particular set of practices or creative processes, Beloufa works primarily as an editor, constructing scenarios to facilitate intersections between different meanings that viewers might build independently.
Neïl Beloufa (1985, Paris) lives and works in Paris. The artist’s solo exhibitions include The Enemy of my Enemy, Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2018); Global Agreement, Schirn Künsthalle Frankfurt, Frankfurt (2018); Neïl Beloufa, The Pejman Foundation, Teheran (2017); Projects 102: Neïl Beloufa, MoMA PS1, New York (2016); Counting On People, ICA, London (2014); Production Value, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2013).
His works have also been presented in institutional collective exhibitions such as 58th International Art Exhibition - La Biennale di Venezia, Venice (2019); Bridging the Gap, Tsinghua University Art Museum, Beijing (2018); Yellow Creature, Kunstmuseum Luzern, Lucerne (2017); AVATAR AND ATAVISM, Kunsthalle Dusseldorf, Dusseldorf (2015); La Biennale de Lyon, Lyon (2013); The Unicorn, Cleveland Museum of Art (2013); 55th Venice Biennale, The Encyclopedic Palace, Veneza (2013); Wiener Secession 11th Baltic Triennale, CAC, Vilnius (2012).