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Art

Michel François: Une Hétérotopie

Belgian artist François hangs this exhibition on French philosopher Foucault’s notion of heterotopia: enclosed environments such as ships and prisons, sometimes mirroring society but often at odds with the world outside. It's on through Sep 15.

Image for Michel François: Une Hétérotopie

Michel François, Instant drawing, 2018 Polska

Belgian artist François hangs this exhibition on French philosopher Foucault’s notion of heterotopia: enclosed environments such as ships and prisons, sometimes mirroring society but often at odds with the world outside. Creating his mini-environment in the gallery, he has scattered the main space with sculptural objects: an oversized beige envelope entitled Piece of evidence (open), a wizened-looking football in One Another (football), which, alluding to Foucault’s ‘other’, has been made from the leather of a jacket hanging next to it. The work Instant Drawing, a cube of charred wood fixed to the white wall, sits at the end of a trail of charcoal, as though it has dragged itself there. In another room are five simultaneously projected videos on loop, some of which directly reference the sculptures: a cacophony of music, alarms and animals plays over a man doing football tricks, another operating a wooden plough yoked to two muzzled cows and a camera slowly moving through claustrophobic corridors of shelves stuffed with mysterious beige envelopes. At first glance an impenetrable conflation of Gallic philosophy and sculpture, this exhibition reveals itself to be a humorous riff on reality, a welcome theatre of the absurd.

Through Sep 15