TheMerode Art Salon: You Have My Attention by Elena Sorokina

For its 3rd occurrence, TheMerode Art Salon has invited curator Elena Sorokina for once again a brilliant exhibition with emergent and established artists.

Inspired by tic-toc debris, monastic manuscript production, or Shâhnâmeh Persian epic, the artists of the exhibition look into our ecologies and possible archeologies of attention, today’s scarcest ressource and one of the chief commodities.

In his groundbreaking book “The Ecology of Attention”, Yves Citton examined how many different environments, from search engines to performance art - condition our individual and collective attention in different ways.

In this context, the exhibition considers the intersections between todays attentional ecologies and practices of sustained attention, care, contemplation and attunement permeating historical arts and crafts, and seen through the eyes of contemporary artists.

This exhibition presents works by Carlotta Bailly-Borg, Mandy El-Sayegh, Pélagie Gbaguidi, Kholod Hawash, Kubra Khademi, Adrien Lucca, Adrien Vescovi and Anna Zemánková.

Join us for the opening and you’ll have the attention of Elena Sorokina who will guide you through the exhibition, followed by an informal talk in presence of the artists.

Portrait Elena Sorokina: ©Lucie Cermakova

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Elena Sorokina is curator and art historian with a particular focus on sustainable curating and practices situated at the intersection of art, ecology and care. Throughout her career, she curated projects for different institutions, both museums and biennials, such as BOZAR, Stedelijk Museum, Pera Museum, Centre Pompidou and many others. She served as curatorial advisor of documenta 14 in Athens/Kassel and was chief curator of the High Institute of Fine Arts (HISK), Belgium in 2017-2018. In 2022, she co-curated the Armenian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale. Sorokina teaches and lectures internationally, she also serves as invited expert of the EU Creative Europe Program.

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Pélagie Gbaguidi (from Benin born in Dakar in 1965), lives and works in Brussels. Gbaguidi calls herself a contemporary "Griot". A "Griot" questions the individual as he or she moves through life by absorbing the words of the ancients and modeling them like a ball of fat that he places in the stomach of each passer-by with the ingredients of the day. In the practical sense, it breaks the commonplace rhythm by inserting subtle incidents integrating its part of eternity. Her work is an anthology of signs and traces on the trauma. Her focus of interest is centered on the colonial and postcolonial archives and on the unmasking of the process of forgetting in history. This readjustment of the imaginary arouses in the artist the urgency to give it form, a writing of liberating images and a corpus to draw contemporary forms.