With Open M, M gives visual artists the opportunity to show their work in our museum galleries. With this initiative, M focuses on artists with a link to Flemish Brabant or Leuven. This edition’s theme is transhistoricity*. The international curator Melanie Bühler (Frans Hals Museum, the Netherlands) made a selection from the 370 proposals submitted. This selection will be shown by M from 06.05.22 in a group exhibition.
The artists
Curator Melanie Bühler selected twelve artists for 'Open M: Time and Again': Daniël Bellon (1976), Paul Bogaert (1968) en Jan Peeters (1978), Ralph Collier (1990), Josefien Cornette (1994), Alexandra Crouwers (1974), Joke De Pever (1993), Laurence Durieu (1972), Bram Rinkel (1996), Witold Vandenbroeck (1994), Danny Vandeput (1974), Jean-Luc van IJperen (1981), Muriel Verbist (1971).
Exhibition ‘Time and again’
It is 2022 and times have changed. After two years of a global pandemic and the uncertainty that came with it, many of us have lost the daily rhythm of our lives. The routines that until now had structured our days, our seasons, our years were suddenly no longer there. Time feels different: warped, stretched, and at the same time accelerated.
The selected works in this edition of Open M deal with the concept and perception of time. This exhibition brings together a selection of artworks that reflect on how different periods of time come together: how the past breaks the present, how the present feels like the past and how time can be experienced differently, beyond the rigidity of the clock and the chronology of history books.
Bringing art from the past and from today together
Open M takes place every two years and each time has a different focus. In this edition of Open M, everything revolves around transhistoricity.* M is a museum that brings together and confronts art from the past and present in new ways. This creates new, surprising links between the past and the present.
With their work, each artist is part of a long visual tradition and thus place themselves in (art) history. M wants to inspire artists to think transhistorically, to react to existing works of art, to enter into dialogue with artists who stimulate them and to challenge art-historical traditions and media.
Open call
Through an open call, artists with a link to Flemish Brabant or Leuven were invited to submit their work for a group exhibition. This time, M received 370 applications.
The call has now been closed, it ended at midnight on Sunday 16.01.22.
It is a concept that we perhaps do not use everyday. In short, it means that art from the past and present are brought together. But there is of course more to it than that. Read the article in M magazine where Peter Carpreau, Head of Department for Ancient Art, elaborates on the theme.
Melanie Bühler (Switzerland, 1983) curates this sixth edition of Open M. Bühler is an curator and writer based in Amsterdam. Since January 2018, she has worked as a curator of Contemporary Art at the Frans Hals Museum, Haarlem (Netherlands). She collaborated on the publication 'The Transhistorical Museum’ (2018) that M Leuven and Frans Hals Museum published together. She was responsible for, among others, the transhistorical exhibitions 'Ruis! Frans Hals, Anders' (2018) and 'Image Power' (2020) in the Frans Hals Museum.
The Frans Hals Museum is the art museum of the city of Haarlem in the Netherlands. With a tantalizing mix of old, modern and contemporary art, the Frans Hals Museum challenges you to look differently and see more. The museum brings together phenomena and ideas, combines pixels with brushstrokes and asks critical questions, sometimes even of itself. It reflects on the existing collection and makes new work by artists possible. In this way, we want to surprise you, offer new perspectives and, above all, show you more.
Like M, the Frans Hals Museum is a transhistorical museum. But there is more because M and the Frans Hals Museum have worked together before. Together, the two museums published 'The Transhistorical Museum’ (2018). In addition, the two museums also organised a lecture series around this theme in which Melanie Bühler also participated. With this international and impartial view, we want to make the best selection for Open M.
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