Jester presents a duo exhibition by Aaron Amar Bhamra and Céline Mathieu

Jester proudly presents Fugue, the first institutional exhibition in Belgium presenting the artistic practices of Aaron Amar Bhamra (°1992, AT) and Céline Mathieu (°1989, BE). The duo exhibition, featuring newly commissioned artworks, emerges from a generous dialogue between both artists. Céline Mathieu’s body of work was developed during her residency at Jester. The exhibition is supported by Phileas, Vienna and the Austrian Cultural Forum, Brussels and will be complemented by a collaborative publication and a public programme. 

Fugue resonates with a harmony found in a variety of voices and fleeting gestures - orchestrated in counterpoint, inversion, and echo. The title is drawn from the Latin 'fuga' (flight) and refers to both meanings of the word: the polyphonic compositional motive of interwoven themes and the psychological state of dissociation. Whereas Aaron Amar Bhamra makes references to his background in architecture and music, exploring doublings/mirrorings/halvings within artworks in the constellation; Céline Mathieu is looking at ways of re-wiring budgets, and re-valuing personal relations. Others are drawn in, literally and figuratively, to make evocative new works that ponder the architecture of the exhibition space and the geolocation of Genk. Sounds and scents doze their sculptures asleep on Jester’s discarded infrastructure, while an unfinished symphony of breaths swells into a breeze that ascends them on air. The ephemeral gestures and elusive interventions take flight to the workshops, the residency and the accommodation building of the organisation, while relations, thoughts, means, and affects circulate and temporarily halt in fugue.

On air:

At the close of the 19th century, the Kneipp sanatorium landed in Bokrijk, a village next to Genk, drawn by the abundance of healthy air. Here, lung patients would reside to cure from tuberculosis and other respiratory ailments through hydro-, balneo- and aërotherapy. Simultaneously, the region of Genk became a renowned station d’artistes - a beloved haven for painters, scientists and writers - that flourished with the same fresh air that nourished its natural landscape. The latter fled when the mining industry of coal extraction irreversibly scarred the landscape. Oxygen was more sparse than rich in this vast network of tunnels, while its fabricators often suffered from dust lungs and other pulmonary diseases. Air thus carries the sound of many voices and the weight of many histories as it adopts many faces - on the one hand healing through purity and presence, on the other harmful through pollution and absence. Air quality and health remain therefore inseparable and indispensable to all life, then and now.

Aaron Amar Bhamra

Aaron Amar Bhamra (°1992, AT) often procures exhibition spaces that subtly expose their systematics and physical experience by incorporating imprints reminiscent of other spaces or past exhibitions. He occasionally uses recurring forms and materials, weaving a site of shifting personal and social archives. 

Aaron Amar Bhamra had recent exhibitions ar Deichtorhallen, Sammlung Falckenberg, (Hamburg, DE); Kevin Space, (Vienna, AT); Fotogalerie Wien, (Vienna, AT); MAUVE, (Vienna, AT); SYSTEMA, (Marseille, FR); Krinzinger Schottenfeld, (Vienna, AT); Galerie Le Carceri, (Bolzano, IT); Wien Museum MUSA; and PHILEAS Project Space, (Vienna, AT). He lives and works in Vienna. Since 2020, Aaron Amar Bhamra and Monika Georgieva, have been running LAURENZ, an independent space in Vienna. Since 2021, he has worked at the Department of Expanded Museum Studies at the University of Applied Arts Vienna.

Celine Mathieu

Céline Mathieu (°1989, Belgium) is an artist and writer. Her practice is often site and condition specific, using sound, scent, sculpture, performance, text and different materials in performative installations. The work is both sensory and conceptual. Her work looks into the circulation of thoughts and materials. Material and economic cycles merge with hyper-personal items, resulting in fluid work that cannot quite be pinned down.Céline Mathieu's research Conditions for Raw Materials considers how to make exhibitions without being left with storage after the show. She looks into the subjectivity of value; how value and worth shift depending on context, sometimes pulling her own economic working conditions into the work. Lastly, the research considers the place of text as a speculative and archival tool, hoping to store the invisible labour and the layered experience of exhibition viewing in a more meaningful way.

Céline Mathieu had recent solo exhibitions at PLUS-ONE Gallery (Antwerp, BE); Sentiment (Zurich, CH) and Gr_und (Berlin, DE). In 2025 she will have solo exhibitions at Gauli Zitter (Brussels, BE); Kunsthalle Trondheim (NO); and a commission at Celador, alongside a duo exhibition at Jester. She was part of group exhibitions at Fondation CAB (Brussels, BE); Gauli Zitter (Brussels, BE); Kunsthal Extra City (Antwerp, BE); Galerie Cité Internationale des Arts (Paris, FR); La Virreina (Barcelona, ES); Mu.Zee (Ostend, BE); Corridor and PuntWG (Amsterdam, NL); CLAPTRAP and AAIR (Antwerp, BE). Her sound work was recently aired on Cashmere Radio (Berlin, DE); Retreat Radio (Malmö, SE) and on Montez Press Radio (New York/London, USA/UK). With her duo CMMC she presented at Museum M, (Leuven, BE); 019/SMAK, Publiek Park (Ghent BE); M HKA Lodgers, (Antwerp, BE); and they had a solo exhibition at IKOB Museum of Contemporary Art, (Eupen, BE). Her research ‘Conditions for Raw Materials’ was supported by the Royal Academy Antwerp in 2022-2023 and she was a participant at Jan van Eyck Academie Maastricht in 2023-2024. Céline’s work was recently featured in Mousse Magazine n° 81.

About Jester:

Jester is a meeting place for the development and presentation of contemporary art where the jesters of the future live, work and share in Genk. The cross-pollination between residencies and exhibitions makes Jester a fertile soil for experimentation, research and exchange in a post-industrial landscape. The jester is an interlocutor who offers no unequivocal answers, but enters into dialogue with outspoken and less heard voices. Jester listens attentively to artists and curators, thinkers and makers, neighbors and partners, to present society with a multi-voiced but critical mirror. These unexpected encounters between artists and the community are at the basis of our eccentric and inclusive operation, where everyone is heard and questioned.

Jester was created in 2021 through the merger of FLACC and CIAP, two Limburg organizations that have grown into vital players in the (inter)national arts field since the 1970s. In 2023, Jester landed in three new pavilions on the C-mine site. Because of the unique history of this mining site - and its neighboring, multicultural cités - social, economic, demographic and environmental issues are deeply rooted in Jester's operation. Winterslag's landscape embodies its ability to generate and process energy, through its industrial past of coal mining, but also through its current concentration of cultural actors and its central location in the Euroregion. Jester establishes new connections from the periphery to this resilient ecosystem to (re)generate new energy in this thriving residency and exhibition space.Jester supports emerging and international visual artists to expand their practice and experiment with new media in our workshops (wood, metal, ceramics and digital). Through artistic, productional and business guidance, Jester encourages these future jesters to question themselves, each other and the world. The different temporalities of development and presentation are inextricably intertwined and meet in an inspiring conversation between different artistic practices. The site around Jester is a developing area, which resonates with a dynamic and transformative program structure where artists help shape the young organization and its evolving physical and mental space. Just as Genk was known at the beginning of the 20th century as a station d'artistes - a beloved haven for painters, scientists and writers - Jester annually welcomes dozens of international artists to meet and explore the scarred, post-industrial landscape together.