Stayin' aliveDiscover the Collections

With almost a century separating them, what could possibly connect two dandies as antithetical as Paul Valéry (1871-1945) and Yves Adrien (1951)? Answer: A shared aversion to museums, which they viewed as necropolises!

For the first, a scholar who could turn his hand to anything and an example of the “national intellectual hero” during the inter-war period, museums were reminiscent of the temple and the salon, the cemetery and the school… Only a civilisation neither sensual nor reasonable could have built thishouse of incoherence. Who knows what nonsense results from gathering together all these dead visions. They envy each other and fight for the contemplation to which they owe their existence,” he wrote in 1923 in Le Problème des musées (The Problem with Museums). For the second, a rock critic, writer, punk and post-punk theoretician, the issue is beyond any doubt: “Is museum the deadest word in the language? Yes." So, in a museum, art is nothing more than dismal (NovöVision. Les Confessions d’un cobaye du siècle (Confessions of a guinea pig of the century), 1980).

The exact opposite to these deathly ideas, Stayin’ Alive. Discover the Collections invites you to discover the BPS22 collections and share their vitality and driving force. Conceived as a series of small formal narrative or semantic segments, the exhibition fosters relationships between the artworks; they respond to each other, enhancing their shared co-existence and unfurling their potentialities depending on the proposed groupings. Through some forty paintings, installations, photographs, drawings and videos drawn from the BPS22 collections and for the most part never before exhibited, Stayin’ Alive. Discover the Collections envisages the museum as an essential place for bringing art alive and sharing it with as many people as possible.

With the creations of Belgian and foreign artists, the exhibition thus paints a dynamic and vibrant picture of the BPS22 collections, arranged to reflect society’s most recent soul-searching. Its title, Stayin’ Alive, taken from the Bee Gees well-known hit, refers to the disco where Saturday night fever only serves to put aside dismay and disenchantment for a while. Thus behind their poetic, dreamlike, humorous or magical aspects, the artworks always address the distinguishing challenges of our time: migration, new spiritualities, identity issues (particularly around gender), cross-fertilisation, economic neglect, environmental crisis, and so on. Here we have, among others, Fake Protest Songs Karaoke by the Luxembourg artist Filip Markiewicz.

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Curator: Pierre-Olivier Rollin
Exhibition dates: 18 February to 23 April 2023
Opening on 17 February 2023