The most ambitious gallery exhibition I’ve seen in a long time looks most like an arcade. That starts with the entrance: anyone who enters Clearing in Brussels is not allowed to enter for free, as is usual in a gallery, but has to pay ten euros. If you do, you enter a shiny, beckoning world of slot machines, virtual experiences, 3D animations, you name it. In that world you are welcomed by three ‘robots’, one blue, one yellow and one red, who talk to you and constantly change. Each of these robots consists of 333 mini-bots, which you can buy as an NFT and with which you, as the owner, can influence their Twitter channel among other things – hello, are you still there?
The fascinating thing about Digital Mourning, this huge contemporary gesamtkunstwerk by French artist Neïl Beloufa is that it’s so hip (NFTs! Virtual! 3D animations! Web 3.0!) that it’s almost a parody of the current NFT and virtual craze that is part of the art world under its spell. Beloufa also hints at that: Digital Mourning (also partly available via the website ebb.global) is slickly designed. Moreover, Beloufa plays with the holy grail of the current generations of NFTs: ‘community building’, in other words binding your buyers to your project. At the same time, Beloufa is enough artist to sow confusion and uncertainty about it. Take the title alone: is there such a thing as digital mourning? In which world does it take place?
To make things even more confusing, Beloufa set up a second exhibition in Brussels, at the Mendes Wood DM gallery, where surprisingly ‘conventional’ works of art are shown: collages, made of MDF and leatherette, showing people completely absorbed in their telephones. , laptop or iPad. The joke is that precisely these works are remarkably ‘flat’, literally: due to the use of leather, every depth, every suggestion of realism has disappeared – these ‘real life’ works are flatter than the virtual ones at Clearing. It is all very much and very confusing, but you are still stimulated: the feeling that Beloufa is building a large, rich world, which, although it looks opportunistic, hides many unexpected depths.