M HKA Ensembles

Some of the exhibitions that also figure as performance, installation, happening, depending on your point of view Jef Lambrecht liked to blurr boundaries...

The installations of Jef Lambrecht were most often (semi-) impromptu affairs created in situ and with materials available in the immediate surroundings... Only occasionally would he include larger pieces brought along, or prepared conceptions of the spacial distribution of objects, except those that were to serve as key reference points... In which case they were often meticulously prepared... (thus semi-impromptu; the degree of theoretical preparation could vary, as well as the material, and to some extent the documentary: in some cases he would prepare a brochure beforehand)

For the archivist it is not easy to reconstruct these pieces, being often of ephemeral nature and even changing during the run of the exhibition... Often functioning as an illustrative process rather than a static presentation. His exhibitions were in effect installations with additional layers of documentation and references to various aspects of the project at hand... One might be inclined to call them 'environments' or even set stages for actions and activities... Like with much of JL's work, it is difficult to nail down definitively, and one has to resort to descriptions and documentations to be able to do them justice... We have to separate the temporary 'scenes/scenario's' of actions from the more (or less) permanent interventions in space or installations... Take the BIWA contribution to the Perfo II festival in Rotterdam (1984) - already in itself a dichotomy of collaboration and individualism - setting up in a room and corridor on a second floor with found material, drawing painting, objects and interactions with visitors... It skirts the edges of all these definitions... And is at the same time a performance...

Solo shows too would be a multi-facetted affair.... Case in point would be the installation in the Majolica room at the Vooruit in Ghent during 'Initiatief d'Amis' at which point the 'ami' and co-director of BIWA would be barred from adding anything to the room full of shredded newspapers and artefacts gleaned from the surroundings, reworked with Chinese or India ink and spray-paint to create a veritable environment ... A memorable scene that amounts to just a pile of papers... Illustrating that the choreography is just as important as the 'decor' itself... As well as it's uniqueness to the space provided... Practically impossible to reproduce anywhere else...

The first Belgian museum of modern art (1983/84) on the other hand could be seen as a relic and a sculpture.... Open air installation and happening. Here too the ephemeral is apparent even though built on the bedrock of the first stone laid in the seventies - the Kaaba of procrastination- the walls were literally paper thin, the construction less than stable, the exhibited artworks improvised nothings.... None of which has survived the years ( even though the basic structure was kept in a basement for about a decade or so...) again, it is down to some memories and sparse documentation to retain it's stature.... ( by now contemporary art museums sprout everywhere... At that time it was really the first and only one.... Hard to believe but true)

The BIWA exhibition at Caidoz gallery in New York City during the series "Minuit in New York" - with it's various manifestations around town can also only be construed as an environment / installation... Being workspace, central office and exhibition space all at once, with, of course, all sorts of found objects, including record players, car bonnets, furniture of sorts and modified trinkets to adorn their shamanic costumes... All interconnected with drawings and paintings made throughout... Here again a coherent overview is extremely difficult, and description along with partial documentation will have to suffice...

The New York exhibition gave rise to the subsequent 'Saint Nicholas Chapter' (based on the NY Saint Nicholas Society and sporting the Weathercock as emblem) that Jef used to disassociate himself from the BIWA while not cutting ties all together... these tenuous relations figured throughout the activities in various guises.

The Saint Nicholas Chapter (1987) saw its first manifestation as a process-installation made with found objects from the "Spullenhulp" thrift store across the road... "Jef Lambrecht werkt naar een slot toe... Open op St. Niklaas" in fact beginning at the end... Crossing between performance, exhibition, environment, public workspace and tableau vivante.... So too the contribution to the exhibition "De Zoen van Vlaanderen" in Delft 1989 in which Jef practically took over the whole school building and turned it into what for all purposes was a squat for the time being.... Armed with only a 'carte de visite' and a rubber stamp, he had sourced all the material locally and created various intriguing showrooms from scratch... Including a Belgian Office sporting hero's such as Eddy Merckx...

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