An exhibition project by Leo Vroegindeweij, Ton Slits, Nathalie Brans, Tinka Pittoors, Rick Vercauteren at the IKOB Museum of Contemporary Art, Eupen

Into The Void, is an exhibition project initiated by the IKOB - Museum of Contemporary Art in East Belgium together with the Dutch artist Ton Slits and the curator Rick Vercauteren to reflect on the future and relevance of artistic practice in the medium of the exhibition together with the participating artists Leo Vroegindeweij, Ton Slits, Nathalie Brans and Tinka Pittoors. This reflection takes place against the backdrop of turbulent times that are full of challenges for us as individuals and as a society. The question we ask ourselves is how artists and curators can work together in a non-hierarchical way to achieve results that both challenge outdated exhibition formats and make it possible for visitors to experience comprehensible results.

The basis of our joint considerations is the realization that the concept of abundance, which was previously often associated with art, must be questioned in order to find new solutions. The abundance of creativity, the overflow of ideas, the unexploited creative potential - these are all notions of art that are associated with a naïve ideology of growth, which on the one hand offers little room for critical self-questioning and on the other has taken art hostage to "more and more". Our cooperative exhibition project therefore concentrates on a different figure of thought, which in recent decades has been made particularly strong by the psychoanalysis of Jaques Lacan and the philosophy of Slavoij Zizek, which he influenced - the void.

We are initially building pragmatically on an exhibition by the above-mentioned artists and curators at De Cacaofabriek in Helmond (Netherlands) in order to enable them to expand on the ideas they gained at the time. This is not the second stop of an exhibition tour with the same works, the same artists and the same texts. More than in Helmond, we want to constructively use the artists' individual approach to the void and present the artists' frank self-delivery to this void as a model for current, urgently needed solutions to problems for discussion. Into The Void is therefore to be understood as an optimistic invitation to surrender oneself to the same uncertainty in order to possibly find something between the certainties that weighs more than certainty. What exactly that is, is to be discovered in the course of the collaboration.

The artistic subject initially finds the empty space through critical self-questioning, which is at the beginning of all creation. Artists have always navigated through an inner, empty desert in order to create something meaningful. This artistic process has often been associated with chaos (also a rhetorical agent of abundance). This common idea is less cliché than an echo of pre-modern philosophy, which also invented a pre-universal chaos and the experience of horror vacui to describe how humans arrived at knowledge. Since the idea of chaos is loaded with false assumptions, we want instead to activate the void in order to arrive at a better understanding of artistic cognitive processes.

When we speak of voids in the context of this project, we actually mean the in-between space that manifests itself alongside the known systems at the edge and at the interfaces. We see it as the unknown terrain where the most interesting results are achieved. For us, artists are researchers of in-between spaces.

As such, the IKOB has invited them to develop an exhibition that offers access to their "interstitial space research" based on works from their many years of art practice. The exhibition searches for works of art that may be proverbially "on the edge", that are rather unusual or special for the respective artists, in order to point them - and thus the visitors - to the gaps in the respective works.

In a prominent room of the exhibition, which we deliberately designed as a blank space and as a laboratory between spaces, the artists are also invited to create a place of encounter and mutual learning that can be anything: exhibition space, laboratory, retreat, work-shop area, coffee kitchen, concert hall or movie theater. Here, the artists can use precisely the empty space that would otherwise be denied to them. However, the surplus space that opens up as a result is not intended to be finalized, but rather to be used again and again as a constant challenge. In order to keep it open as an empty space, we rely on fleetingness, change, and short-termism and hope that this will result in a project that understands art viewing and art production as a necessarily collaborative project.