INBOX: Caroline Coolen – Gather thistles, expect prickles
image: Caroline Coolen
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.
"Gather thistles expect prickles”
As an artist, Caroline Coolen enjoys the freedom of (re)creating the world as an Umwelt she feels is or would be her preferred environment - sensitive and sensuous as plants; instinctive and intuitive as animals; somewhat (ir)rational as mankind. Her work stands for the elements, the animals, the people(s) who are in the margin, excluded by a growingly standardised, controlled, consumeristic society. She would depict moths rather than butterflies, thistles rather than flowers, underdogs rather than horses, birch trees rather than oak trees.
Echoing her consistent drive for freedom and independence, Coolen's operating modes vary with each work anew. Assembling materials in improbable associations, juxtaposing different processes, she tests the limits of that freedom, questions the codes of artistic practices while studying the way in which nature and culture might coexist.
Hidden narratives are condensed in sculptural pieces, in installations and drawings. As in tales, violence and poetry co-inhabit. As in thistles, beauty and danger prickle the beholder. Caroline Coolen’s works echo vulnerability and strength with the capacity to resist as a clue to life and art.
- Tania Nasielski
At M HKA’s INBOX, Caroline Coolen (Be, 1975) will be both showing recent works and launching her book Carlina Vulgaris with a whole new body of images and a text by curator and writer Tania Nasielski.
THU: 06.09 from 19:00 till 21:00
Preview with a book presentation “Caroline Coolen - Carlina Vulgaris” (on sale in the museumshop for €35)
SUN: 30.09 at 14:00 in the auditorium
INBOX-talk with Tania Nasielski and Caroline Coolen on the book ‘Carlina Vulgaris’.
You can purchase the sculpture Gather thistles, expect prickles for €1250 by contacting twh@thewhitehousegallery.be.