A reflective look at Valérie Mannaerts’ ‘Antennae’

What happens when we really look? How does meaning arise both in and through an image? How do material, scale, and space relate to our perception? During this Food for Thought evening, art historian and philosopher Thierry de Duve guides you through ‘Antennae’, Valérie Mannaerts’ solo exhibition at M. Drawing on his own thinking about art and aesthetics, de Duve offers a sharp and personal perspective on the exhibition.

Thierry de Duve and Valérie Mannaerts have known each other for a long time. In 2003, they collaborated on Mannaerts’ exhibition in the Belgian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale, a presentation she realized in collaboration with the artist Sylvie Eyberg. Since then, they have been engaged in an ongoing dialogue about images, materiality, and the conditions of viewing.

New perspectives

This guided tour of ‘Antennae’ does not start from a traditional art-historical interpretation, but from careful observation and reflection. Engaging in dialogue with the works on display, de Duve opens up new perspectives on themes that have characterized Mannaerts’ practice for thirty years: tactility, fragmentation, architecture, vulnerability and imagination.

The exhibition will then travel to the Centre d’art contemporain d’Ivry – Le Crédac, where Valérie Mannaerts’s work will be on display from January to March 2027.

About Thierry de Duve

Historian and philosopher of art Thierry de Duve is Professor Emeritus at the University of Lille 3 and the Evelyn Kranes Kossak Professor at Hunter College, City University of New York.

He is the author of ‘Pictorial Nominalism’ (1991), ‘Kant After Duchamp’ (1996), ‘Clement Greenberg Between the Lines’ (1996, 2010), ‘Look–100 Years of Contemporary Art’ (2001), ‘Sewn In the Sweatshops of Marx: Beuys, Warhol, Klein, Duchamp’ (2012), ‘Aesthetics at Large, Volume One: Art, Ethics, Politics’ (2018) and ‘Duchamp’s Telegram, From Beaux-Arts to Art-in-General’ (2023), amongst other titles. He is currently working on ‘Kant after Darwin’, a follow-up to ‘Kant after Duchamp’ in which he attempts to reinterpret Kant’s ‘Critique of Judgement’ from the perspective of contemporary biology, and the second volume of ‘Aesthetics at Large’, entitled ‘Farewell to Romanticism’.

Guided tour led by artists Manon De Boer and Hana Miletić

Can’t make it? On Thursday 28 May, artists Manon De Boer and Hana Miletić will lead a joint guided tour of ‘Antennae’, followed by a short discussion with Valérie Mannaerts (in Dutch).

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