Selection
A national jury selected Mostafa Saifi Rahmouni, Maika Garnica and mountaincutters to create a new outdoor sculptural work for the Middelheim Museum.
New work
Location: Hortiflora
The 3 new creations are presented in the formal landscape of Hortiflora and literally and figuratively move the visitors. The works challenge us to think about what we see and what we don't see, where our imagination can complete the story.
- Curator: Pieter Boons
- Jury: Sofia Dati, Johan Muyle, Louise Osieka, Paul Peeters, Samuel Saelemakers, Pieter Boons and Sara Weyns
- Chairman Jury: Filips De Ferm
- An initiative of the Middelheim Promoters, with the special support of Delen Private Bank
The artists
Mostafa Saifi Rahmouni
Mostafa Saifi Rahmouni (°1991), was born in Rabat and currently lives and works between Bordeaux, Brussels and Rabat. His work is built around various cultural, social and political references, around personal stories and the great history. The artist combines serious and tragic subjects, or references to post-colonial issues, with poetry and humour. Using fragments from everyday life, his works reveal the mundane and the morbid, but also the exceptional and the sublime. Mostafa Saifi Rahmouni completed his post-master at HISK in Ghent, after having followed a training course at the National Institute of Fine Arts in Tetouan and a sculpture workshop at ENSAV-La Cambre in Brussels. Mostafa Saifi Rahmouni’s work has been shown in numerous exhibitions in Europe, such as Rosalux, Berlin (2018); Centrale-Lab, Brussels (2017); BOZAR as part of the Moussem Cities Festival, Brussels (2018); Biennale de Sharjah, Beirut (2017) and at the 63rd Salon de Montrouge (2018).
Maika Garnica
Central in Maika Garnica´s (°1992) practice is the relationship between the environment, the spectator and the artist. She often applies prototypes to comprehend the complex relation between form and matter while instigating the position of the body as a vehicle for social connections. Through various contextual variations the nature of the work shifts spontaneously from sculptures, utilitarian objects to sound installations. Garnica currently lives and works in Antwerp, where she obtained her Master's Degree in Fine Arts at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in 2015. Her work has been exhibited in numerous solo and group shows in Belgium and abroad, such as SMAK, Ghent (2016); Netwerk Aalst (2018); Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (2020) and M HKA, Antwerp (2019 & 2021).
Maika Garnica's work came about thanks to a special collaboration with art foundry Van Geert.
© Ian Coomans
mountaincutters
mountaincutters (founded in 2014) is a hybrid identity, a duo of artists working in Brussels. With a focus on in-situ sculpture, they draw on the connection between human beings and the environments they inhabit. Their steel structures, glass elements, ceramics, fabrics and organic materials, as well as their poems and copper circuits form temporary ecosystems, in which energy is channeled between the human, the organic and the inanimate. mountaincutters' interventions generate, through the establishment of a poetic system, an aesthetic uncertainty that favors transient situations and unfinished forms. mountaincutters' work has been presented in solo and group show in Belgium and in France, such as La Verrière-Fondation Hermès, Brussels (2021); CAB Foundation, Brussels (2017); Le Creux de l'Enfer Art Center, Thiers (2019); Le Grand Café Art Center, Saint-Nazaire (2018); Friche de la Belle de Mai, Marseille (2020) and Extra City Kunsthal, Antwerp (2016).