BUREN COLLECTIVE

BIO

Oshin Albrecht:
Oshin is a visual artist who started her practice studying painting at Sint-Lucas, LUCA-arts in Ghent. Later on she went to a.pass, advanced performance and scenography studies in Brussels. She had the oppurtunity to work as a performer during the exhibition ‘All the knives’ at Z33 (November ‘12 – February ‘13) and was a solo performer in the film ‘A Way of Making’ by Frederique Bergholz (If I Can’t Dance, I Don’t Want To Be Part Of Your Revolution) and Maria Pask. The film was shown in Ellen De Bruijne Projects, Amsterdam, januari 2013.

Melissa Mabesoone:
After a year of studying philosophy, Melissa went on to become a Master in Graphic Arts at KASK, Ghent (Belgium). Autumn 2012 she moved to Amsterdam were she got in touch with Kunstverein Amsterdam (founded by Maxine Kopsa and Krist Gruijthuijsen) and worked there for 3 months. In 2014 she was an actress in Davis Freeman’s ‘Fathers and sons’, which was presented in Monty, Antwerp. In june 2015 she performed for Peter Aers ‘Everything depends on how a thing is thought II’. July 2015 she acted in Assaf Gruber’s The Anonimity of the night – The Guardroom.

‘buren’ is a collaborative project of Oshin Albrecht (BE, 1986) and Melissa Mabesoone (BE, 1988),both based in Ghent (BE). Their first performance ‘buren by buren’ (2013) was created within the framework of Les Laboréales and was presented at Maison Folie, Mons (BE), La Bellone, Brussels (BE), Buda, Kortrijk (BE) and S.M.A.K., Ghent (BE). In November 2015 it will be performed again at Z33, Hasselt (BE). Their second performance ‘Have you rearranged the flowers?’ (2014) was shown in amongst others Les Atelier Claus, Brussels (BE), Greylight Projects, Brussels (BE) and Arti & Amicitiae, Amsterdam (NL). Buren’s first solo exhibition ‘The room in the middle is a garden’was presented in Galerie Am Polylog, Wörgl (AT). They were residents at ‘BijlmAIR’, Amsterdam (NL) and are currently working on a new project ‘PARADE/PROMENADE’ during residencies at Croxhapox, Ghent (BE), Vooruit, Ghent (BE) and Bains Connective, Brussels (BE). In January 2016 they will start a residency at HISK, Ghent (BE).

The term buren was found in Heideggers’ ‘Building, Dwelling, Thinking’ in which ‘buren’ correlates with building and living. What does it mean to nest oneself or keep a ‘household’? Buren functions as a noun and as a verb, as an umbrella term for their practice and as a way of working together. They research amongst  others, subconscious sensations and desires, ways of dealing with commodity and property, the promise of happiness and a unique identity. How to deal with today’s impasse and the possible failure of our good life fantasies? This is expressed in different media such as performance, installation, video and film. In their performances they often combine various modes of language deriving from advertisement, etiquette, talk shows and songs. By using these forms they  create a layered content to showcase both a critical and poetic potential. In their performances they form and transform installations that refer to domestic architecture, creating a constantly changing space; the scenography is a performance. The materials and objects they choose symbolize the artificiality of how we tend to shape our identities. Buren aims to unmask, scan and affirm this fantasy.

FRAME OF RESEARCH

In Parade/Promenade we want to portray differences between embedded systems and phantasmagoric ones. These differences or shifts could be cultural, political and even religious concepts that arise from our desires and fears, utopian and/or dystopian visions of our past and future. We are inspired by Modest Mussorgsky’s ‘Pictures at an Exhibition’, 1874: a musical piece in 10 movements. This ‘suite’ consists of several depictions of paintings interspersed with a recurring ‘Promenade’ theme. It shows the act of strolling between paintings, but at a certain point the Promenade stops functioning as merely a linking device and becomes an integral element of the movement itself. Other influences are Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes from 1916-1917 and Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities. 

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