Thomas Lanigan-Schmidt’s Lemon Sour Balls in Cherry Syrup travelled from Berlin to Brussels for a second showing in our semi-renovated apartment space during Art week Brussels. Here we also launched the book, Rat Attack in Hell’s Kitchen, a collaboration between Thomas Lanigan Schmidt and Daragh Reeves, designed and edited by Ana Baliza and published by Buzzer Reeves’s imprint Frank Jacket in an edition of 500 copies. 

Scenography and installing: Takahiro Kudo
Documentation: Isabelle Arthuis

Floor plan ↗

Labjure has long been captivated by the act and architecture of staging, yet her exhibition Bedroom POV at Buzzer Reeves marks a bold and experimental turn toward pop performance for real, arriving just ahead of the release of her first album.

Co-developed with longtime collaborator Maria Jooyoung, the stage installation makes use of the gallery’s position facing the city at street level: the floor is raised to window height, transforming it into an oversized shopfront display. Shutters frame the space on all sides and spotlights filter through from inside the room, bending light into shifting patterns. Lace adorns the microphone and stand and covers the pedestal that extends into the room like a runway, offering moments of stepping out.

Labjure’s installation extends beyond the stage itself: a miniature model of the set appears in a separate room, filling the space with turquoise light, while live CCTV feeds the performance to the extended audience via screens mounted in the bathroom and corridor of the gallery. These dispersed perspectives unsettle the coherence of the stage, reframing it through multiple points of view that oscillate between proximity and Labjure’s own play with intimacy and control.

The relation between the miniature model and the oversized stage evokes a world of unstable proportions, where shifts in size mark thresholds of altered perception. Labjure’s writing of lyrics in tiny notebooks - fragile, intimate, provisional—carries within it both the tenuous illusion of grandeur and the genuine potential to outgrow the page. This trajectory echoes the genealogy of Bedroom Pop itself, a genre defined by the tension between its modest conditions of origin and its capacity to exceed them.

Documentation: Mathilde Heuliez

Buzzer Reeves is delighted to present Lemon Sour Balls in Cherry Syrup the first Berlin solo exhibition of Thomas Lanigan-Schmidt (b. 1948 New Jersey), bringing together eclectic works from a 40 year period, including new works by the 77 year old artist.

The show’s enigmatic title is taken from a historical work in the exhibition (Still Life with Lemon Sour Balls in Cherry Syrup (from the Venetian Glass series), 1984). This piece is typical of Lanigan-Schmidt’s handmade transformations of lowly materials into sparkling, humourous and often homo-erotic infused treasures. They express affinities for the kitsch, the sublimely holy and the artist’s own working class origins. Works in the show include bejeweled rats, tin foil chalices, tissue box drawings and collaged lasagne trays.

As a young artist, Lanigan-Schmidt made a name for himself hosting exhibitions in his New York Lower East Side tenement apartment and enjoyed close associations with figures such as curator Henry Gelzhahler, actor/director Charles Ludlam, the artist Jack Smith and gallerist Holly Solomon.

As one of the last surviving veterans directly involved in the 1969 Stonewall riots, Lanigan-Schmidt was honoured by President Barack Obama at the White House in 2009. In 2019, his work was featured on the cover of Artforum to mark the 50th anniversary of Stonewall’s pivotal role in LGBTQ history.

Lanigan-Schmidt has exhibited extensively in the US and Europe, including the Venice Biennale (1980, 1984), the Whitney Biennial (1991), and the survey exhibition The American Century (1999), also at the Whitney. In 2012, PS1 MoMA presented his acclaimed retrospective, Tender Love Among the Junk.

Works by the artist may be found in the collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, The Brooklyn Museum, New York; Ludwig Forum Aachen; MUMOK, Vienna, among others. His work is currently on view in MoMA New York’s permanent collection.

Floor plan ↗

Spike Magazine review ↗

Gallerytalk review ↗

Taz review (DE) ↗

Taz review (English translation) ↗

In Waltz of the Flowers, Takahiro Kudo brings together works from previous shows alongside new pieces. His works consistently reference concepts of interpersonal relationships, intimacy, and the tension between closeness and distance.

At the center of Kudo’s new work is an installation featuring an LP player and three recordings of Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker Op. 71, Waltz of the Flowers, each performed on a single instrument and pressed onto separate discs, reflecting Kudo’s ongoing fascination with the individual and his role. “As someone who went through the Japanese education system, there’s a standardized process of making an individual, someone who is good at almost everything but lacks individual strengths.”

The individual is portrayed as a single instrument within a bigger and broader orchestra. We’re invited to engage with the artist’s externalized inner dialogue, through which he invites us to explore the connections between individualism, collectivity, and the concept of imposed selection, allowing for a study of the individual’s ever-present dilemma of availability—both timely and physical while linking this to his own exploration of monogamy, polyamory, and open relationships. Kudo recounts: “I recognized a pattern in my past relationships, particularly after I defined my sexuality as gay. I’ve always needed a period of monogamy with one person, just to get to know them, to get to know my partner. But eventually, I started to wish for more. It’s not that I’m unhappy with my partners, but I realize I have a certain need for contact with other people. This is why I find the idea of imposed selection interesting, the idea that only one player is chosen, and the recording that is played has to be actively selected.”

Hidden in plain sight, concepts of closeness and distance serve as a narrative line to help us navigate between the artists’ own debate of what is right and what is wrong. In Untitled (Thin Soft Lies), 2018, he touches on the use of lies, as a tool or an instrument of protection. Recalling whether or not to tell his grandma about his sexuality during what would be his last visit to her, he says: “I didn’t tell her. I don’t necessarily regret it, but since then, the question of what I choose to share with others has stayed with me, especially in intimate relationships. I wonder if it’s a lie, or more of a soft shell, like an oblaat. It’s very much a Japanese expression, but by wrapping bitter medicine in oblaat, a thin sheet of starch, it doesn’t taste as bad when you put it in your mouth.”

These same protective mechanisms are recognizable, maneuvers of sorts, used to navigate vulnerable situations and maintain stability within our own emotional framework. Gathered by his own experience of navigating the gay dating scene, the artist highlights how these mechanisms are used as a way to distance ourselves, maintaining social distance by solely seeking the sexual market as a protective measure, instead of aiming for genuine human contact. These intricate fine tunings of morality brought forward by the artist, form a pattern, a carrying vessel through this particular body of work.

Rodrigo Costa Ribeiro, Freelance journalist
Born Torres Vedras, Portugal, 1997

Floor plan ↗
Thanks and credits ↗

There is a whole genre of videos on YouTube that show people moving sofas; men in three-quarter trousers and trolleys, corporate promo videos, as well as private footage of couples. The camera is perched on a stool or small table as the two of them maneuver a leather sofa through a door. The object on which people sit or lie can only enter or leave the room vertically. An average three-seater sofa measures approximately 225 × 90 × 80 cm. Standard doors are available in widths from 630 mm to 930 mm in 50 mm increments and in heights of 2015 mm, 2115 mm and 2315 mm.

Entering a friend’s place for the first time, opening the door, stepping inside. A moment of recognition or a complete reassessment of who you thought they were?

When a few months ago Daragh proposed to make an exhibition in the empty apartment on Rue Kindermans before he’d move in, I used the chance to bring together a group of artists whose work I admire. Some of them are peers with whom I shared front doors and kitchen sinks, others came from different generations and places.

Along the way other resonances and connections emerged: the blurred edges of a landscape asking where will I live instead of what do I own? Others taking jabs at the singularity of the portrait, doing painterly justice to the complex nature of being human. A chair showing the instability in our world of objects; unavailable to sit on, ready for a fall. Dust not sucked into the abyss of the vacuum cleaner but compressed into a new object, solidifying place. A needle through a wall; aluminum foil and nail polish folded and pressed into something else with a face; the bed as studio; the curtains as frame. An endless stream of rooms, a bearded dragon in New York, a knight guarding the fridge. A group of abandoned mirrors forcing you to settle for just a part of yourself.

This show addresses the messy process of materializing the self within the home in an ongoing battle between interiority and exteriority fought out behind closed doors. Like any invitation, once accepted, the task of interpreting and responding to its furnished interior falls upon the visitor, a threshold between two minds.

Text: Thomas Swinkels
Photography: Thomas Swinkels


Floor plan ↗
Thanks and credits ↗

Zapp Magazine (1993–1997) was an Amsterdam based international art magazine in the form of a video tape. Sold in shops or mailed out to subscribers, it contained works of video art by a veritable who’s who of the artworld, plus many special clips and features. The freedom it offered people to zapp with their remote controls through what were essentially video art exhibitions in their own homes, profoundly disrupted the traditional presentation of video art, and is one of the many reasons Zapp is so legendary.

Buzzer Reeves has recreated a semi-domestic setting, reminiscing the original Zapp viewers’ experience within which one can binge watch all 12 seasons of Zapp Magazine. One of the beautiful things about Zapp is it was made by insiders who were part of the same social scene as the artists themselves. Dinners, afterparties and show build-ups were recorded unselfconsciously and the result captured a unique view into what it was like to be a successful young artist or budding gallerist in the 1990’s.

The volumes of Zapp along with the hours of previously unpublished raw footage, stand today as a precious and unrivalled historical record of a vibrant time that unwittingly has become distinguished as the last and final pre-internet era.

Zapp produced #11 VHS magazines between 1993 to 1997 and in 2007 a final DVD edition. Each video box featured an artist commissioned cover: #0 Kathe Burkhart, November 1993, #1 Lily van der Stokker, March 1994, #2 Elise Tak, July 1994, #3 Marijke van Warmerdam, October 1994, #4 Barbara Visser, April 1995, #5 Rita Ackermann, Summer 1995, #6 Lothar Hempel, December 1995, #7 Miltos Manetas, March 1996, #8 Mariko Mori, Summer 1996, #9 Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, March 1997, #10 Tobias Rehberger, October 1997, #11 Daragh Reeves, 2007 (DVD)*

*The exhibition features original cover design prototype sketches for the 2007 volume, and site specific interventions in homage of Zapp Magazine.

A few months ago, Thomas crammed a surgical camera into his throat. The resultant photographs are strangely charming — free of the gagging sensation that he pushed through in order to make them. One such image opens this show. In it, a pair of tiny feet appear in deep perspective between glistening teeth. The little picture is spiked with body horror. In low-fi form, it touches the spookiness of how Big Tech places surreptitiously inside of us. Together, flesh and camera become material for a sculpture made from body, technology and image, about the way we’re encased by ourselves, and the secrets that those encasements hold.

In this exhibition’s central work the site of sculpture is extended to cars, video surveillance, architecture, and gruesome histories of empire. Eight monitors show the respective viewpoints of as many dash cams, attached to a single car. As if through the fragmented vision of a gigantic spider we see the passing city in a dark evening light. Before long the car travels a winding path up and down the garage’s ramp which, owing to the building’s cylindrical form, is shaped like an enormous corkscrew. On the monitors, the car’s coruscating route becomes a tumbling and twisting film noir mosaic. The un-pictured driver is a void inside the image.

Thomas came across the parking garage several months ago on a stroll through Brussels. Called the Rotonde Castellini, its architecture was built 150 years ago as part of a grand project to reanimate history, by way of a 360 degree panoramic painting by Charles Castellani. Prior to the advent of cinema such panoramas suffused the modernising European consciousness with memories of military victory and colonial conquest. This particular panorama showed first the Battle of Waterloo, where Napoleon I suffered his final defeat, and then the Anglo-Zulu War, in which the British Empire conquered South Africa.

By 1924, with cinemas spreading through Europe, Castellani’s panorama had become redundant. It was thereupon converted to a parking garage. While the panorama drove singular visions of history into Belgian minds, Thomas’s eight videos show Belgian minds and eyeballs returning to the pre-cinematic propaganda device, albeit under the banal auspices of motor-propelled city life. In this bathetic mise-en-abyme, one technology of all-seeing vision twirls within the obsolete carcass of another.

Text: Mitch Speed

Mail
daragh@buzzerreeves.com

Instagram
@buzzerreeves

Skalitzer Str. 76
10997 Berlin Kreuzberg
⚫ Buzzer Reeves

Thomas Lanigan-Schmidt
Lemon Sour Balls in Cherry Syrup
5 – 7 September 2025

Installation view

Thomas Lanigan-Schmidt’s Lemon Sour Balls in Cherry Syrup travelled from Berlin to Brussels for a second showing in our semi-renovated apartment space during Art week Brussels. Here we also launched the book, Rat Attack in Hell’s Kitchen, a collaboration between Thomas Lanigan Schmidt and Daragh Reeves, designed and edited by Ana Baliza and published by Buzzer Reeves’s imprint Frank Jacket in an edition of 500 copies.

Scenography and installing: Takahiro Kudo
Documentation: Isabelle Arthuis

Floor plan ↗

Installation view

Photobooth Angels, 2024, sharpie, ballpoint pen, gel pen on tissue box, 21 × 5 cm

Labjure
Bedroom POV
25 July 2025, 9 pm

Labjure has long been captivated by the act and architecture of staging, yet her exhibition Bedroom POV at Buzzer Reeves marks a bold and experimental turn toward pop performance for real, arriving just ahead of the release of her first album.

Co-developed with longtime collaborator Maria Jooyoung, the stage installation makes use of the gallery’s position facing the city at street level: the floor is raised to window height, transforming it into an oversized shopfront display. Shutters frame the space on all sides and spotlights filter through from inside the room, bending light into shifting patterns. Lace adorns the microphone and stand and covers the pedestal that extends into the room like a runway, offering moments of stepping out.

Labjure’s installation extends beyond the stage itself: a miniature model of the set appears in a separate room, filling the space with turquoise light, while live CCTV feeds the performance to the extended audience via screens mounted in the bathroom and corridor of the gallery. These dispersed perspectives unsettle the coherence of the stage, reframing it through multiple points of view that oscillate between proximity and Labjure’s own play with intimacy and control.

The relation between the miniature model and the oversized stage evokes a world of unstable proportions, where shifts in size mark thresholds of altered perception. Labjure’s writing of lyrics in tiny notebooks - fragile, intimate, provisional—carries within it both the tenuous illusion of grandeur and the genuine potential to outgrow the page. This trajectory echoes the genealogy of Bedroom Pop itself, a genre defined by the tension between its modest conditions of origin and its capacity to exceed them.

Documentation: Mathilde Heuliez

Thomas Lanigan-Schmidt
Lemon Sour Balls in Cherry Syrup
1 – 24 May 2025

Installation view

Buzzer Reeves is delighted to present Lemon Sour Balls in Cherry Syrup the first Berlin solo exhibition of Thomas Lanigan-Schmidt (b. 1948 New Jersey), bringing together eclectic works from a 40 year period, including new works by the 77 year old artist.

The show’s enigmatic title is taken from a historical work in the exhibition (Still Life with Lemon Sour Balls in Cherry Syrup (from the Venetian Glass series), 1984). This piece is typical of Lanigan-Schmidt’s handmade transformations of lowly materials into sparkling, humourous and often homo-erotic infused treasures. They express affinities for the kitsch, the sublimely holy and the artist’s own working class origins. Works in the show include bejeweled rats, tin foil chalices, tissue box drawings and collaged lasagne trays.

As a young artist, Lanigan-Schmidt made a name for himself hosting exhibitions in his New York Lower East Side tenement apartment and enjoyed close associations with figures such as curator Henry Gelzhahler, actor/director Charles Ludlam, the artist Jack Smith and gallerist Holly Solomon.

As one of the last surviving veterans directly involved in the 1969 Stonewall riots, Lanigan-Schmidt was honoured by President Barack Obama at the White House in 2009. In 2019, his work was featured on the cover of Artforum to mark the 50th anniversary of Stonewall’s pivotal role in LGBTQ history.

Lanigan-Schmidt has exhibited extensively in the US and Europe, including the Venice Biennale (1980, 1984), the Whitney Biennial (1991), and the survey exhibition The American Century (1999), also at the Whitney. In 2012, PS1 MoMA presented his acclaimed retrospective, Tender Love Among the Junk.

Works by the artist may be found in the collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, The Brooklyn Museum, New York; Ludwig Forum Aachen; MUMOK, Vienna, among others. His work is currently on view in MoMA New York’s permanent collection.

Floor plan ↗

Spike Magazine review ↗

Gallerytalk review ↗

Taz review (DE) ↗

Taz review (English translation) ↗

Thomas Lanigan-Schmidt, Untitled, 2024–2025, Sharpie, ballpoint pen, gel pen on tissue box, various sizes

Installation view

Installation view

Installation view

Installation view

Thomas Lanigan-Schmidt, Photobooth Angels, 2024, Sharpie, ballpoint pen, gel pen on tissue box, 21 × 5 cm

Thomas Lanigan-Schmidt, The Byzantine dialogue between fashion and art, ca. 2004, mixed-media collage, 46 × 36 cm

Installation view

Installation view

Thomas Lanigan-Schmidt, Tenements, 1985/2012, brown paper bags with Sharpie, various sizes

Thomas Lanigan-Schmidt, Untitled (Placemat), ca. early 2000s, mixed-media collage, 29 × 42 cm

Installation view

Installation view

Installation view

Installation view

Thomas Lanigan-Schmidt, Untitled, 2024–2025, Sharpie, ballpoint pen, gel pen on tissue box, various sizes

Thomas Lanigan-Schmidt, Untitled, 2024–2025, Sharpie, ballpoint pen, gel pen on tissue box, various sizes

Thomas Lanigan-Schmidt, Untitled, 2024–2025, Sharpie, ballpoint pen, gel pen on tissue box, various sizes

Exhibition poster

Installation view

In Waltz of the Flowers, Takahiro Kudo brings together works from previous shows alongside new pieces. His works consistently reference concepts of interpersonal relationships, intimacy, and the tension between closeness and distance.

At the center of Kudo’s new work is an installation featuring an LP player and three recordings of Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker Op. 71, Waltz of the Flowers, each performed on a single instrument and pressed onto separate discs, reflecting Kudo’s ongoing fascination with the individual and his role. “As someone who went through the Japanese education system, there’s a standardized process of making an individual, someone who is good at almost everything but lacks individual strengths.”

The individual is portrayed as a single instrument within a bigger and broader orchestra. We’re invited to engage with the artist’s externalized inner dialogue, through which he invites us to explore the connections between individualism, collectivity, and the concept of imposed selection, allowing for a study of the individual’s ever-present dilemma of availability—both timely and physical while linking this to his own exploration of monogamy, polyamory, and open relationships. Kudo recounts: “I recognized a pattern in my past relationships, particularly after I defined my sexuality as gay. I’ve always needed a period of monogamy with one person, just to get to know them, to get to know my partner. But eventually, I started to wish for more. It’s not that I’m unhappy with my partners, but I realize I have a certain need for contact with other people. This is why I find the idea of imposed selection interesting, the idea that only one player is chosen, and the recording that is played has to be actively selected.”

Hidden in plain sight, concepts of closeness and distance serve as a narrative line to help us navigate between the artists’ own debate of what is right and what is wrong. In Untitled (Thin Soft Lies), 2018, he touches on the use of lies, as a tool or an instrument of protection. Recalling whether or not to tell his grandma about his sexuality during what would be his last visit to her, he says: “I didn’t tell her. I don’t necessarily regret it, but since then, the question of what I choose to share with others has stayed with me, especially in intimate relationships. I wonder if it’s a lie, or more of a soft shell, like an oblaat. It’s very much a Japanese expression, but by wrapping bitter medicine in oblaat, a thin sheet of starch, it doesn’t taste as bad when you put it in your mouth.”

These same protective mechanisms are recognizable, maneuvers of sorts, used to navigate vulnerable situations and maintain stability within our own emotional framework. Gathered by his own experience of navigating the gay dating scene, the artist highlights how these mechanisms are used as a way to distance ourselves, maintaining social distance by solely seeking the sexual market as a protective measure, instead of aiming for genuine human contact. These intricate fine tunings of morality brought forward by the artist, form a pattern, a carrying vessel through this particular body of work.

Rodrigo Costa Ribeiro, Freelance journalist
Born Torres Vedras, Portugal, 1997

Floor plan ↗
Thanks and credits ↗

Untitled (Beautiful Days), 2024, sun-bleached wooden plate, anti-UV varnish, 62 × 42 × 3 cm

Untitled (Beautiful Days), 2024, sun-bleached wooden plate, anti-UV varnish, 62 × 42 × 3 cm

Installation view

Untitled (It’s Complicated), 2024, mount on 2 sheets of newspaper, 124 × 79 × 4 cm

Untitled (It’s Complicated) (detail), 2024, mount on 2 sheets of newspaper, 124 × 79 × 4 cm

Installation view

Untitled (Love in C Minor) and Untitled (Midnight’s Door), 2024, sun-bleached wooden plate, anti-UV varnish, 62 × 42 × 3 cm

Installation view

Installation view

Installation view

Untitled (Life Itself) (detail), 2012–2024, milk, freezer, 100 × 61 × 56 cm

Installation view

Untitled (No One Like You), 2024, 3 LP records and LP player, dimensions variable

Installation view

Untitled (The Creation of Adams) (detail), 2024, video installation with mirror balls, dimension variable, 4:45

Untitled (The Creation of Adams) (detail), 2024, video installation with mirror balls, dimension variable, 4:45

Untitled (The Creation of Adams) (detail), 2024, video installation with mirror balls, dimension variable, 4:45

Exhibition poster

Against Nutrition
at Systema, edition 3, Marseille
30 August – 1 September 2024

Michael Van den Abeele, Elena Hizaar, Thomas Lanigan-Schmidt

Performance shot of Elena Hizaar’s ‘The Dead and the Living’, 2024

Michael Van den Abeele, Against Nutrition, printed collage made of inverted potato chip bags, 2024

Michael Van den Abeele, Against Nutrition (detail), printed collage made of inverted potato chip bags, 2024

Michael Van den Abeele, Against Nutrition (detail), printed collage made of inverted potato chip bags, 2024

Elena Hizaar, Spirits of Nature, Shadow’s Love, papier maché, 2024

Michael Van den Abeele, Left to my own devices, video projection with mirror shelf, 2024

Thomas Lanigan-Schmidt, Rat Attack in Hell’s Kitchen (detail), 1998

Thomas Lanigan-Schmidt, Rat Attack in Hell’s Kitchen (detail), 1998

Michael Van den Abeele reading his writings with Bob Fosse musical interlude

Audience view

Exhibition poster

Couch/Door Problem
Group exhibition
14 April – 15 May 2024

Installation view

There is a whole genre of videos on YouTube that show people moving sofas; men in three-quarter trousers and trolleys, corporate promo videos, as well as private footage of couples. The camera is perched on a stool or small table as the two of them maneuver a leather sofa through a door. The object on which people sit or lie can only enter or leave the room vertically. An average three-seater sofa measures approximately 225 × 90 × 80 cm. Standard doors are available in widths from 630 mm to 930 mm in 50 mm increments and in heights of 2015 mm, 2115 mm and 2315 mm.

Entering a friend’s place for the first time, opening the door, stepping inside. A moment of recognition or a complete reassessment of who you thought they were?

When a few months ago Daragh proposed to make an exhibition in the empty apartment on Rue Kindermans before he’d move in, I used the chance to bring together a group of artists whose work I admire. Some of them are peers with whom I shared front doors and kitchen sinks, others came from different generations and places.

Along the way other resonances and connections emerged: the blurred edges of a landscape asking where will I live instead of what do I own? Others taking jabs at the singularity of the portrait, doing painterly justice to the complex nature of being human. A chair showing the instability in our world of objects; unavailable to sit on, ready for a fall. Dust not sucked into the abyss of the vacuum cleaner but compressed into a new object, solidifying place. A needle through a wall; aluminum foil and nail polish folded and pressed into something else with a face; the bed as studio; the curtains as frame. An endless stream of rooms, a bearded dragon in New York, a knight guarding the fridge. A group of abandoned mirrors forcing you to settle for just a part of yourself.

This show addresses the messy process of materializing the self within the home in an ongoing battle between interiority and exteriority fought out behind closed doors. Like any invitation, once accepted, the task of interpreting and responding to its furnished interior falls upon the visitor, a threshold between two minds.

Text: Thomas Swinkels
Photography: Thomas Swinkels

Floor plan ↗
Thanks and credits ↗

Installation view

Alison Yip, Where Will I Live (Calgary), 2021, oil, paper, laminate tile, 27.5 × 41.5 cm, image courtesy of the artist and Galerie Noah Klink

Frieder Haller, Untitled, 2024, unframed ink jet print on paper, 50 × 70 cm, image courtesy of the artist

Cecilia Bjartmar Hylta, red tracy, 2022, silicone, dust, 15 × 10 × 15 cm, image courtesy of the artist

Installation view

Anders Dickson, Lazarus, 2024, sound, 5:54 min, image courtesy of the artist

Carla-Luisa Reuter, Meine vielen Anzieh­sachen, 2023, oil on linen, 170 × 130 cm, image courtesy of the artist

Vic Gentils (Ilfracombe (GB) 1919 – Aalst (BE) 1997) The Mecenas and his wife, 1967, part of the installation: painting and 3 sculptures, oil on canvas, paint on wood, image courtesy of the Vic Gentils Estate, Collection Annie Gentils

Vic Gentils (Ilfracombe (GB) 1919 – Aalst (BE) 1997) The Mecenas and his wife, 1967, part of the installation: painting and 3 sculptures, oil on canvas, paint on wood, image courtesy of the Vic Gentils Estate, Collection Annie Gentils

Stephen G. Rhodes, Portacorner, 2023, two-channel video installation, video projection, sound, color, 5:00 min, looped, image courtesy of the artist and Galerie Isabella Bortolozzi

Stephen G. Rhodes, Portacorner, 2023, two-channel video installation, video projection, sound, color, 5:00 min, looped, image courtesy of the artist and Galerie Isabella Bortolozzi

Clémence de la Tour du Pin, Host, 2021, fragrance and bottle conceived and designed by the artist, mouth-blown glass, 15 × 15 × 10 cm, image courtesy of the artist

Julien Bismuth, Cross Point (for C.X.), 2024, yarn, wall, dimensions variable, image courtesy of the artist

Minne Kersten, *ghosts don’t like new things, 2023, publication, tabloid newspaper, image courtesy of the artist and Annet Gelink Gallery

Jacqueline Peeters, Chair With Safety Corner Protectors, 1995, Oil and cutouts on canvas, 100 × 80 cm, image courtesy of the artist and Annie Gentils Gallery

Julien Bismuth, Cross Point (for C.X.), 2024, yarn, wall, dimensions variable, image courtesy of the artist

Adrien Meurrens, Edger #6, 2024, found mirrors, 86 × 141 cm, image courtesy of the artist

Thomas Lanigan-Schmidt, Rat, 2023, aluminum foil, nails, shoe-polish, nail-polish, glitter, wire, 23 × 6 × 8 cm, image courtesy of the artist and Pavel Zoubok Fine Art

Installation view

Daragh Reeves, Bird on a Train, 2024, view from window, framed by curtains, image courtesy of the artist

Laura Caetano, Anjos indisciplinados, 2023, oil, monotype on glass, 40 × 30 cm, image courtesy of the artist

Thomas Swinkels, safe #2, 2019, safe, 45 × 39 × 32 cm, image courtesy of the artist

Exhibition poster

Zapp Magazine (1993–1997)
Revisiting the legendary
’90s artworld video-zine
13–17 September 2023

Installation view

Zapp Magazine (1993–1997) was an Amsterdam based international art magazine in the form of a video tape. Sold in shops or mailed out to subscribers, it contained works of video art by a veritable who’s who of the artworld, plus many special clips and features. The freedom it offered people to zapp with their remote controls through what were essentially video art exhibitions in their own homes, profoundly disrupted the traditional presentation of video art, and is one of the many reasons Zapp is so legendary.

Buzzer Reeves has recreated a semi-domestic setting, reminiscing the original Zapp viewers’ experience within which one can binge watch all 12 seasons of Zapp Magazine. One of the beautiful things about Zapp is it was made by insiders who were part of the same social scene as the artists themselves. Dinners, afterparties and show build-ups were recorded unselfconsciously and the result captured a unique view into what it was like to be a successful young artist or budding gallerist in the 1990’s.

The volumes of Zapp along with the hours of previously unpublished raw footage, stand today as a precious and unrivalled historical record of a vibrant time that unwittingly has become distinguished as the last and final pre-internet era.

Zapp produced #11 VHS magazines between 1993 to 1997 and in 2007 a final DVD edition. Each video box featured an artist commissioned cover: #0 Kathe Burkhart, November 1993, #1 Lily van der Stokker, March 1994, #2 Elise Tak, July 1994, #3 Marijke van Warmerdam, October 1994, #4 Barbara Visser, April 1995, #5 Rita Ackermann, Summer 1995, #6 Lothar Hempel, December 1995, #7 Miltos Manetas, March 1996, #8 Mariko Mori, Summer 1996, #9 Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, March 1997, #10 Tobias Rehberger, October 1997, #11 Daragh Reeves, 2007 (DVD)*

*The exhibition features original cover design prototype sketches for the 2007 volume, and site specific interventions in homage of Zapp Magazine.

Installation view

Installation view

Daragh Reeves, sketches for Zapp Magazine, 2007

Daragh Reeves, sketches for Zapp Magazine, 2007

Zapp Magazine #11, May 2007, Cover: Daragh Reeves

Installation view

Installation view

Installation view

Zapp Magazine #0, November 1993, Cover: Kathe Burkhart

Zapp Magazine #1, March 1994, Cover: Lily van der Stokker

Zapp Magazine #2, July 1994, Cover: Elise Tak

Zapp Magazine #3, October 1994, Cover: Marijke van Warmerdam

Zapp Magazine #4, April 1995, Cover: Barbara Visser

Zapp Magazine #5, Summer 1995, Cover: Rita Ackermann

Zapp Magazine #6, December 1995, Cover: Lothar Hempel

Zapp Magazine #7, March 1996, Cover: Miltos Manetas

Zapp Magazine #8, Summer 1996, Cover: Mariko Mori

Zapp Magazine #9, March 1997, Cover: Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster

Zapp Magazine #10, October 1997, Cover: Tobias Rehberger

Installation view

Installation view

Exhibition poster

Installation view

A few months ago, Thomas crammed a surgical camera into his throat. The resultant photographs are strangely charming — free of the gagging sensation that he pushed through in order to make them. One such image opens this show. In it, a pair of tiny feet appear in deep perspective between glistening teeth. The little picture is spiked with body horror. In low-fi form, it touches the spookiness of how Big Tech places surreptitiously inside of us. Together, flesh and camera become material for a sculpture made from body, technology and image, about the way we’re encased by ourselves, and the secrets that those encasements hold.

In this exhibition’s central work the site of sculpture is extended to cars, video surveillance, architecture, and gruesome histories of empire. Eight monitors show the respective viewpoints of as many dash cams, attached to a single car. As if through the fragmented vision of a gigantic spider we see the passing city in a dark evening light. Before long the car travels a winding path up and down the garage’s ramp which, owing to the building’s cylindrical form, is shaped like an enormous corkscrew. On the monitors, the car’s coruscating route becomes a tumbling and twisting film noir mosaic. The un-pictured driver is a void inside the image.

Thomas came across the parking garage several months ago on a stroll through Brussels. Called the Rotonde Castellini, its architecture was built 150 years ago as part of a grand project to reanimate history, by way of a 360 degree panoramic painting by Charles Castellani. Prior to the advent of cinema such panoramas suffused the modernising European consciousness with memories of military victory and colonial conquest. This particular panorama showed first the Battle of Waterloo, where Napoleon I suffered his final defeat, and then the Anglo-Zulu War, in which the British Empire conquered South Africa.

By 1924, with cinemas spreading through Europe, Castellani’s panorama had become redundant. It was thereupon converted to a parking garage. While the panorama drove singular visions of history into Belgian minds, Thomas’s eight videos show Belgian minds and eyeballs returning to the pre-cinematic propaganda device, albeit under the banal auspices of motor-propelled city life. In this bathetic mise-en-abyme, one technology of all-seeing vision twirls within the obsolete carcass of another.

Text: Mitch Speed

Installation view

Installation view

Installation view

Portrait, 2023, C-Print in aluminium frame, passe-partout, museum glass, 14.8 × 14.8 × 2.5 cm

Installation view

Installation view

Installation view

Panorama Parking (detail), 2023, 8 screen video installation with sound, looped, 3:15 min (16:10)

Four Lights (detail), 2023, Corrugated cardboard, plastic, lee filter, LED spotlights, Dimensions variable

Four Lights (detail), 2023, Corrugated cardboard, plastic, lee filter, LED spotlights, Dimensions variable

20 Times (detail), 2023, Aluminium, Dimensions variable

20 Times (detail), 2023, Aluminium, Dimensions variable

Installation view

20 Times (detail), 2023, Aluminium, Dimensions variable

Installation view

Installation view

Program

Installation view

Installation view

Installation view

Sailors of the Land
Group exhibition
14–18 September 2022

Keren Cytter, Shana Moulton, Alexandre Estrela, Thomas Swinkels, Susan Conte, Henrik Strömberg, Morgan Betz, Sarah Rosengarten, Thomas Lanigan-Schmidt, Takahiro Kudo, Mathieu Gargam, Julien Bismuth

Installation view

Installation view

Installation view

Sarah Rosengarten, MIM Mineral Museum 1, 2022, C-print, 59 × 83 cm

Thomas Swinkels, ‘Love’, 2022, C-print in artist’s frame, 14.5 × 14.5 cm, Edition of 30

Morgan Betz, Mets, 2022, Acrylic on canvas, 130 × 197 cm

Mathieu Gargam, Fétuque (fescue), 2022, Plaster cast of 35 mm slides in the wet sand of the beach of Bréhec, France at sunset as the pink full moon rose on the horizon of a summer’s day, 2022, 13 × 20 cm

Shana Moulton, Undiscovered Drawer, 2013, HD digital video, 9:19 min

Thomas Swinkels, safe #7, 2022, Safe, 35 × 25 × 25 cm

Thomas Swinkels, safe #8, 2022, Safe, 32.5 × 32.5 × 17 cm

Takahiro Kudo, Untitled (Homo Nest Raided, Queen Bees Are Stinging Mad), 2022, Sun tanned newspaper, wood, metal chain, 62 × 45 cm

Thomas Swinkels, Dark & Stormy, 2022