So, here you are – Christine Boillat/Nina Haab

Opening, Thursday 11 November 2021, 2 pm

The artists Christine Boillat and Nina Haab, who are exhibiting in Belgium for the first time, both work with drawing and installation. They explore worlds where reality and fiction are intertwined. The exhibition So, here you are brings together projects with a link to recent events, yet in their landscapes time is suspended, dreams and reality merge, creating new places to escape to.

Combining everyday tragedies and an imaginary world populated by characters and animals engaged in strange rituals, the work of Christine Boillat probes the deep foundations of grief on which our lives are built. Her current projects are mainly based on charcoal drawings, while also integrating an installation dimension. Her large-scale drawing Fumée continues the theme of other drawings in the same format realised in the past few years. Functioning like a kind of shelter or refuge, the artist’s dreamlike universe is superimposed on the catastrophe caused by the fire that invades the paper.

Nina Haab presents part of her installation Missive (2017 – 2020) by adapting it to the space and situating it on an island of sand. Some drawings from her new series Locus Amoenus (2020-ongoing) are mounted on the walls. As the title suggests, the landscapes in these drawings reference idealised, secure and comforting places, retreats that restore and revitalize us. Haab’s work centres on history and collective memory, through biographically oriented investigations drawing on the personal archives of her protagonists. She explores their memories, tells their stories and invents others.

Christine Boillat was born in Lausanne (CH) in 1978. She lives and works between Grenoble (FR) and Geneva (CH) where she graduated from HEAD in 2005, obtaining an MA with the commendation of the jury. Her work is regularly exhibited in Switzerland and abroad in galleries, art spaces and at fairs. Her most recent large solo exhibition took place at the Chapelle du Quartier Haut in Sète, France, in 2019. She was awarded the cantonal art prize FCAC in 2005 the prize for drawing of the National Institute of Geneva in 2015. (www.christineb.ch)

Nina Haab was born in 1985 in Bellinzona (CH). She lives and works in Geneva and completed her MA in visual arts at HEAD Geneva in 2011. Nina Haab regularly exhibits all over Switzerland as well as internationally. She has presented her work at CAC Genève (CH), Kunstmuseum Lucerne (CH), Museo d’arte della Svizzera italiana in Lugano (CH), Kunsthaus Langenthal (CH), GAM, Turino (IT), KunstWerke|Studiolo Berlin (DE), and galerie Szydlowski, Warsaw (PL), among others. In 2012, she was a recipient of a Swiss Art Award and in 2020, she was awarded the Bourse Abraham Hermanjat. (www.ninahaab.ch)