Pilar ASAP
The Liminal Edition

Iv (In vitro*) is a project space and event series based in Brussels. It focuses on promoting contemporary music and sound art through live performances and time-based exhibitions. By cultivating new frameworks for experimental practices, it tries to nurture an artistic community that’s often overlooked in their commercial and institutional fields. In vitro seeks to create a platform for the dissemination of sound on an international scale. 

"Are We Nearly There Yet?" — a question often asked with impatience, curiosity, or the wishful anticipation of a destination to come — serves as the point of departure for Medusa’s exhibition on cultural memory. While image trends may fade quickly, certain visual tropes endure, holding lasting significance for a generation’s coming-of-age. 

From cartoons and pop culture artifacts to the aesthetic markers of the “naïve” — bold colours, simple forms, and graphic minimalism — these icons hold meaning beyond their brief appearances.The works on view deliberately nod to such iconography. Yet, rather than retreating into the sentimentality of the past, the exhibition considers how playful imagery and visual silliness carry not only themes of longing, liminality, and coming-of-age but layers of critique that address “adult” systems of power and the structures of modernity. Are We Nearly There Yet? is therefore less about expecting an answer and more concerned with the process of gaining credibility in what is so often rendered “childlike” in contemporary life.

Inland Island finds itself between a guided meditation and a séance. A guided meditation, where attention becomes an act of imagination. And a séance for unfolding the limited dichotomies through which we tend to look at the world around us: fiction/reality, near/far, I/other. With a central part and fascination for the hands of the listener.

These hands of yours, look at them. Look at your primary way of holding onto things. Your medium, really, for getting a grip on the world, to handle it, to hold it still,For if not, it might move around and over you uncontrollably. But when soft hands tenderly open up a gap, the unknown full of things, full of beings, may come into the light to play. There is a lot happening here.

In this a performative installation / poetic audiopiece, you take a seat at a table with a small group of participants. Through headphones, you are addressed by a voice without a body. This voice belongs to a liminal being - an angel, an alien? At the same time present and absent, this eternal witness speaks about things happening at and far beyond that table. “If we opened people up, we’d find landscapes” (Agnes Varda) This being is looking for connection, both with the listener as between the listeners. Like a sort of science fiction, Inland Island opens up a broader, more tender view of the present and the individual in it.