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Contemporary Art Listings The Hague

Tag: Clémentine Vaultier

  • Public Talk: Clémentine Vaultier, Ciel Grommen, and Maximiliaan Royakkers

    As part of the public program accompanying Extractive Imagination(s) chapter 2: The Perfect Loaf, The Balcony will host a talk by scholar and researcher Stephanie O’Rourke.

    Stephanie O’Rourke is a Scotland-based visual culture schola, particularly in relation to resource extraction, scientific knowledge, and media technologies in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. She is a Senior Lecturer in art history at the University of St Andrews in Scotland. She has previously served as a Research Fellow at The Museum of Modern Art, a Pierre and Tana Matisse Fellow at Columbia University, and a Visiting Scholar at the Yale Center for British Art. She holds a BA from Harvard University (2008) and a PhD from Columbia University (2016).

    Her prize-winning first book (Art, Science and the Body in Early Romanticism, 2021, Cambridge University Press) examines the changing evidentiary authority of the human body at the dawn of the nineteenth century. Her second book, Picturing Landscape in an Age of Extraction (September 2025, University of Chicago Press) examines how artistic production responded to and helped to shape the rise of extractive capitalism at the turn of the nineteenth century. She regularly partners with artists and climate scientists to explore alternative strategies for visualising the legacies of extraction in the present day.

  • Extractive Imagination(s) chapter 2: The Perfect Loaf at the Balcony

    The second chapter of Extractive Imagination(s) examines the overlap between the physiological human need to maintain a body temperature of 37°C and the (social) infrastructures we’ve developed to stay warm – what we define today as architecture. In other words, how did the harvesting of resources related to our quest for heat (initially wood, peat and coal) shaped social gatherings and the domestic space?

    “The search for warmth created social and political forms of grouping, like vigils in the countryside: a characteristic element of traditional rural life, is well motivated by the search for warmth, as well as by the desire to ‘enjoy a lamp, or fire maintained at common costs’. – Philippe Rahm.”

    How and what do we extract to fire? More importantly, with whom do we share the resulting warmth? The exhibition looks at infrastructure in The Netherlands, particularly in The Hague.

    ARTISTS

    The husband and wife team of Bernd (1931-2007) and Hilla (1934-2015) Becher began photographing together in 1959. For nearly fifty years, they documented architectural forms they called “anonymous sculpture.” The Becher produced black-and-white photographs, using a large-format camera under overcast skies to capture shadowless front and side views. Arranging these in grids, they created “typologies,” grouping buildings by function to highlight their similarities and differences.

    Atlas of Ovens explores containers of heat and baking rituals, how and what we fire, and with whom we share the resulting warmth. The artist’s trio Clémentine Vaultier, Ciel Grommen, and Maximiliaan Royakkers, all based in Belgium, research how oven infrastructures can transform not only matter but our relationships to communities and territories.

    Clémentine Vaultier (b.1991, FR) works at Max and she is an associate at Jubilee – platform for artistic research. Her ongoing research focuses on warmth as both a physical and social phenomenon, for which she received a prize at KASK Ghent. Her interest lies in the surroundings of the fire rather than its production. Her plural, dialogical practice connects ceramics, performance, and pedagogy, creating and rearranging technical, historical, and archival material to keep the fire going.

    Ciel Grommen (BE) is an artist and architect whose context-based practice explores how we live together through a variety of artistic gestures like constructions, events, maps, books, stories, and conversations. She is pursuing a PhD at LUCA School of Arts on habitation in places of production. Her projects have engaged sites like refugee camps, demilitarized zones, and industrial spaces, shown at C-mine Genk, Artsonje Seoul, Z33 Hasselt, VAi Antwerp, Red Cross Museum Geneva, 019 Ghent, and Kunstenfestivaldesarts Brussels.

    Maximiliaan Royakkers (b.1988, BE) is an artist and researcher whose work addresses political, ecological, and social dynamics through installations, research, and teaching (Antwerp University, ULB La Cambre Horta, ULiège, Faculty of Architecture Leuven University). Educated at KU Leuven and Sandberg Institute, he collaborates widely and publishes regularly. His projects have been exhibited at C-mine Genk, Bureau Europa Maastricht, De Singel Arts Center Antwerp, Z33 center for contemporary arts, and Jan Van Eyck Academy Maastricht.

    Arjun Das (1994, India), like many others from his village, moved to Kolkata with his brothers to work in a restaurant at the age of 10. However, his attraction toward drawing was never lost. His experience of working in a small dhaba (restaurant) allowed him to closely examine the behaviour and sociality of a section of migrant labourers. He looks into the sculptural, formal, aesthetic possibilities of objects, thereby making attempts to bring iconic, sculptural presence in them.
    Arjun holds BFA and MFA in Sculpture from Rabindra Bharati University and took part in the 2023-24 residency at Jan van Eyck Academie, as well as a recent solo presentation at Fons Welters. Recently he took part in The Balcony’s presentation at Art Rotterdam INTERSECTIONS.

    The exhibition includes the production of new work by Collective Atlas of Ovens, existing work by Arjun Das, Jan van Eyck Academie resident 2023-24, and original prints by Bernd & Hilla Becher.