page_title: Bart Cassiman
section_title: Curatorial practice
hierarchical_section_title: Bart Cassiman / Curatorial practice
caption_attribution_description: English: Gerhard Richter - installation view: The Sublime Void, Royal Museum of Fine Arts, Antwerp (1993)
context_page_description: Bart Cassiman, freelance-curator, art critic and editor, is an art historian and studied press- and communication sciences at the Ghent University.
context_section_description: As a free-lance curator he organized several exhibitions between 1989 and 1991. Amongst others:
  Rombouts and Tordoir, Douglas Hyde Gallery, Dublin, 1989.
  Noli me tangere - with Lili Dujourie and Cristina Iglesias, Locus Solus - Genova, Italy, 1990.
  De Pictura - an exhibition on motive and alibi in the painting of Herbert Brandl, Helmut Dorner, John Murphy, Mitja Tušek, Narcisse Tordoir and Walter Swennen - Bruges La Morte, Bruges, 1990.
  The solo-exhibitions of Lili Dujourie, Kunstverein, Bonn, 1989; Le Magasin, Grenoble, 1990.
  Espacio Mental with René Daniëls, Thierry De Cordier, Isa Genzken, Cristina Iglesias, Thomas Schütte and Jan Vercruysse at Valencia, IVAM-El Carme in 1991 was his first major group show. The exhibition contained about 80 artworks, was complex and layered so that the different interrelations between the artworks became almost endless.
  Bart Cassiman was the project-leader of the section Contemporary Visual Art of Antwerp 93, European Capital of Culture. For this temporary organization he realized three major projects which differed in terms of intent and content.
  For the Middelheim Museum he invited ten artists (Per Kirkeby, Richard Deacon, Panamarenko, Thomas Schütte, Juan Muñoz, Matt Mullican, Bernd Lohaus, Harald Klingelhöller, Didier Vermeiren, Isa Genzken) to make a work, which was bought by Antwerp 93 for the permanent collection. They were placed on Middelheim Low, which became by doing so the section of contemporary art of the museum. A section invented by Cassiman and realized with the support of Bob Cools (The Mayor), Eric Antonis (the intendant of Antwerp 93) and Hans Nieuwdorp (the director of the Art Historical Museums of the City of Antwerp). This project became known as New Sculptures.
  For the first time, the Royal Museum of Fine Arts hosted contemporary artists who gave form to entwining of remembrance and imagination in the creative process. This project (exhibition and book), The Sublime Void (on the memory of the imagination),  included the artists Jean-Marc Bustamante, Jan Vercruysse, Rachel Whiteread, Juan Muñoz, Niek Kemps, John Murphy, Mitja Tušek, Gerhard Richter, Michelangelo Pistoletto, Luc Tuymans, Robert Gober, Cristina Iglesias, Harald Klingelhöller, Didier Vermeiren, Thomas Schütte, Ettore Spalletti, Luciano Fabro, Jeff Wall, Jannis Kounellis, René Daniels, Franz West, Fortuyn/O’Brien, James Welling, Lili Dujourie and Thierry De Cordier. The accompanying publication contains texts, essays, poems etc. by a.o. Adorno, Augustinus, Baudelaire, Benjamin, Blanchot, Borges, Broch, Canetti, Handke, Hölderlin, Kafka, Kristeva, Musil, Michelangelo, Nietzsche, Pascal, Proust, Rilke, Valery, Wenders, Wordsworth…It has been rewarded with the Gouden penning van Plantijn-Moretus, an award for the best book published in 1993.
  For the third project, he invited after conscientiously research and several workshops three colleagues-curators (Iwona Blazwick, Yves Aupetitallot and Carolyn-Christov Bakargiev) to make an exhibition with artists from different cultural backgrounds to produce a new work in the extended M HKA. The for a long time underestimated exhibition On taking a normal situation and translating it into overlapping and multiple readings of conditions past and present which included at that time a few well-known artists (such as Jimmy Durham, Mark Dion, Eugenio Dittborn, Judith Barry and Renée Green) in combination with a lot of artists who were at the beginning of their public life and have since then co- determined the international discourse for years (Maria Eichhorn, Zarina Bhimji, Ann Veronica Janssens, Andrea Fraser,…)
  From 1994 until 1998 he was member of the advisory-committee of the Middelheim Museum, Antwerp.
  Bart Cassiman was part of the Jury of the Mies van der Rohe Stipendium Krefeld (1990-1995) and of the program-commission of the Appel Foundation, Amsterdam (1989-1993).
  In 1995 he realized an exhibition with Dora Garcia, Dianne Hagen, Gert Verhoeven, Lisa May Post, Anne-Marie Schneider and Stephen Wilks, at Galerie Nelson, Paris. In the same year he co-ordinated 
caption: Gerard Richter - The Sublime Void, Royal Museum of Fine Arts, Antwerp (1993)
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