Museumplein 02:
Peter Downsbrough
OTHER / THE
September 2024 - March 2025
Museumplein is an invitation to artists to create work that temporarily occupies Jan Hoetplein. This square connects different museums – S.M.A.K., MSK, and GUM – with each other and breathes Ghent’s history: it is flanked on one side by the Botanical Garden and embraced on the other by the Citadelpark. Thus, Jan Hoetplein is a special place with many possibilities.
With these presentations we like to dream about what the future may bring, and showcase a new series of artworks in public space. Museumplein invites a different artist every five months to create work for the five gigantic flags in the flowerbed in front of S.M.A.K. For five months, each work seeks connection with the square, the park, the city, and its residents, prompting us to reflect on the role that art can and should play in public space.
The work of Peter Downsbrough (1940, New Jersey – 2024, Brussels) invites the viewer to engage with space in a new way. In Downsbrough’s work, space is inhabited by simple geometric shapes and short words that define, intersect, and delineate the space. They prompt us to think about how we understand the space around us. At the same time, they create a new relationship between concepts such as place and space, and between language and meaning.
Museumplein presents OTHER / THE, which Downsbrough created in 2020. The artwork features a tilted rectangle with the words OTHER and THE. For this project, the piece was divided into five parts, with the word OTHER split along a vertical axis and spread across two different flags. The fragmented image can now only be read in fragments, and depending on your viewpoint as a spectator, different pieces of the city, museum, or park slip in and out of view.
In this play of whole and parts, THE and OTHER are clearly legible concepts. THE OTHER refers to the other side, the rest, what falls outside the standard—outside ourselves, outside the city, outside our society. We could view this work as a celebration of this other. A society is constantly in motion and is always seeking a balance between ‘us’ and ‘the other.’ When the other asserts itself and becomes the new standard, what is considered normal today can quickly become strange—leading the concept of ‘the other’ to sometimes evoke resistance. While the artist did not create this work as a specific response to the challenges our society faces in developing an inclusive character, it can certainly be interpreted in this way within the current right-leaning political climate.
OTHER / THE is dedicated to the Brussels architect Christian Kieckens, who passed away in 2020. Over the past decades, Christian collaborated on several projects with Peter Downsbrough.
All images courtesy of the artist
Installation photography: Joselito Verschaeve
Museumplein is a project by artlead and S.M.A.K, supported by the City of Ghent.
