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M HKA reserves its fifth floor for surprising interventions and intimate pop-up presentations. INBOX is a place that inspires and surprises, one that offers us a glimpse into the world of passionate thinkers and doers. With INBOX, M HKA creates a physical space in which the museum addresses often-recurring questions.

In the periods between the various events, we present a selection of our collection works, with particular attention to video art.

INBOX can be visited for free.

 

Tout court

In our most inattentive moments we are often the boldest artists. Everyone is familiar with the thoughtless drawings, created during a phone conversation, or sculptures, such as a chewed pen cap, or a cookie wrapper, smashed into a ball to fight boredom and left behind on a table. During these rare moments we switch off our cultivated head and, often out of boredom, simply do. Tout court.

These moments remind us of an open and tactile encounter with things. D.D. Trans embraces the seemingly worthless objects that are all around us. A simple sponge is so replaceable, we even forget to invent a colour for it. This is precisely why these treasures display the most random, genuine and unrestrained colour palette. This also applies to the balloon, which in all its futility only serves for play. It barely has the time to be a thing, after we offer it some air and tie a knot in it. D.D. Trans savours and transforms that innocence. He connects it to the unbearable lightness of a kitsch painting. He cherishes the sneaky game of a boy with his father’s lighter. The greatest form of melancholy is often hidden in this casual experiment. He heats straws until they become two dangling halves of a tear. A collector stated that the work is ‘more exciting than Jaws’. Two fused pushpins are named b fifty 2, a title that refers to a bomber. A trinket: atomic art, tensions caught in the absolute smallest form, a stealthy tragedy…

Is that a child’s bike I see, which we so hopelessly outgrow? A kind of nostalgia exists for that unprejudiced outlook. Our dark keyboard, is limited. You cannot escape it. With age the glass fogs up and a needless wave of values and seriousness flows between us and the world. The work of D.D. Trans seems repulsively light, but it contains a sustained effort to keep the interaction with things clear and unpretentious. It is in that small margin, that short distance between seeing and making, where there is the most room for poetry and magic.

– Frederik Van Laere