Limbo Act II

Group show at Everyday Gallery, Antwerp, 2021

Limbo Act II presents a younger generation of artists that plays with the seemingly reductive language of memes and cartoons. The hollow eyes of its cartoonesque depiction of animal life and neon-shaped memes express the tragic nature of our situation: memes compressed information, saying very much with very little, but they are also a reduction of meaning, reducing its to all too simple forms. Likewise, cartoons depict animals, but they turn them into funny, human-like forms that do not do justice to what really lies beyond the human. As much as these artists seem to want to escape their current situation and the society that has caused it, their cartoonesque and meme-like aesthetics still squarely places that desire for escape within the confines of human society. Here, again, we are caught in limbo.

And yet, if the events of the past six months have made anything clear, it is how fragile human society and human lives can be. LIMBO is a first attempt to come to terms with this fact without claiming to have any answers. It shows us a world on the threshold of something new, but still struggling with the old. We do not know yet where this is going, or what will become of it. We are waiting for something is taking its course.

Text by Bram Ieven