Dissertation prizes 2017
The winner of the dissertation prize 2017 is: Charlotte Stuby!The jury also awarded two laureates with an honorable mention: Gabri Molist Sancho and Manuel Penteado!At the proclamation their co-supervisors - Anja Veirman, Isolde Vanhee and Tom Van Imschoot - read a laudatio, that you can reread here ...
Charlotte Stuby - laudatio 'Creatures in reality' by Anja Veirman
Charlotte’s thesis reads like a travelogue from the ordinary to the fantastic, from the trivial to the fascinating. It’s a praise of everyday life where reality is never what it seems. It all started with floating textile elements in the landscape. Merely banal objects that drew Charlotte’s attention; like covers on plants, cars or motorcycles, fabrics on scaffoldings, or nets on vineyards. Charlotte analyses aspects of form, surface, functionality, tactility, plasticity and materiality, and she explores the notions of reality, ambiguity, and territoriality in a poetic and playful way. She draws us from observations, through personal experiences, a rich body of literature and phenomenological reflections into her aesthetics of the world. Hereby transposing these objects to another level: the level of mystery, reverie and an altered, enriched sensitive perception. The reader gets involved in Charlotte’s inquiries and lured into her surrealistic and sensitive interpretations.It’s truly an artist’s text, driven by perception and reflections in correspondence with the making process of her textile creations. In Charlottes artistic practice Making by thinking and Thinking by making go hand in hand, and this dialogue breaths through her written reflections. The thesis played a crucial and critical role in the development of her artwork, and Charlotte makes us part of her artistic research. We get an inside view in how her perceptions and thoughts are taking form. And that’s just one of the pleasures reading this thesis!Charlotte Stuby offers us a gift, a gift of reimagining and altering our own banalities by opening up our senses to another vision and experience of the world.
Gabri Molist Sancho - laudatio by Isolde Vanhee
Doomed is a comic book by Gabri Molist. Or isn’t it? Doomed is almost exclusively built on smart and witty dialogues. Can a comic exist, can it ‘be’ without images? And what happens when the author of a comic loses control over his creation, gets sucked into his own story and starts bickering with his characters? And what if that same author exposes himself as a troubled and lovesick writer, does that mean that the fiction has drifted into reality? Or is it the other way around? In Doomed, we follow two characters that question life, love, destiny, art and creation altogether. You can almost hear Gabri think (and laugh) out loud, with his characters, with the unruly nature of his comic, and ultimately with himself as the out-of-control creator. The more things get out of hand between the characters and their creator, the more complicated the existential questions that are being raised. Gabri Molist has made a comic where creating a comic and researching its existence are bound together. In the letter that accompanies his comic, Gabri addresses the reader and talks about all things, big and small, that challenge him as an author. He writes about the use of panels in comics, about the dialogue between fiction and reality, about the way humour shoots in all directions, but he also writes about soccer and his hometown Barcelona, comparing himself to Xavi Hernandez and stressing the importance of having the ball at all times. As a comic book writer, Gabri has balls. Doomed is one big gag, from start to finish, but, in the end, you are no longer sure on whom the joke is and who finally has the ball. What you do know is that funny dialogues can be serious business, that they can be disturbing, disruptive, dangerous even, for writers, their characters and their readers.
Manuel Penteado - laudatio by Tom Van Imschoot
All order turns into entropy, the second law of thermodynamics explains. So what does it mean then to make a living as an artist, that is to say: to devote your life to finding shapes amidst chaos? Suggested Permanence, the thesis of Manuel Penteado, looked for the elegance of a mathematical solution at first, the perfection of a circle. Yet it gradually dissolved into a cluster bomb of imperfect shapes and things that were collected, looked at, studied, and endlessly rearranged as an end in itself. Which is exactly the way all work of art begins. While reading one feels like entering a Wunderkammer, a space where the most curious shapes of our daily world are assembled in order to comprehend the “universal” laws that govern them. Yet, Manuel is not like a God looking for the very key of creation. He has too much a taste for decay and the humour of irregularity to understand that his artistic focus is more about questioning where creation begins and ends. Or about the ultimate freedom that stems from understanding the limits of what an artist is able to do, regarding for instance the simple yet mind-blowing beauty of what is only pure coincidence. Thus, a sculpture made by cows in West-Flanders gets connected to Einstein’s theory of relativity in this serious yet playful thesis. In-between both we see the artist changing from a painter and a sculptor into a collector of things that are exactly in-between, while his collection of shapes and time and emptiness and stories all of sudden turns into ‘the thing itself’. This is a wonderful example of how to turn the book of your thesis into an exhibition space for the recollection of a thought process, a process that is potentially endless if it weren’t for the need to make a work of art in the end, a finite shape endowed with the illusion of immortality. Seldom have I seen an all-encompassing ambition and a humourous sense of banality getting so fluidly intertwined in a master project as in this fun thesis that testifies to the never-ending work of the earnest, generous and, strangely enough, lazy Manuel Penteado.
photos © Koen Cant
