A Conversation with Niekolaas Johannes Lekkerkerk, Artistic Director, POPPOSITIONS Art Fair, Brussels, Belgium, by James Scarborough

This 8th edition of the POPPOSITIONS art fair is entitled The Capital of Woke: On formulating resistance to capitalised ideologies. Comprised of work chosen by a 5-person selection committee, It will feature 25 participants from 12 countries. (See below). For the third time, Niekolaas Johannes Lekkerkerk will be the artistic director. His co-director will be Rachelle Dufour. Mathias Prenen will design the space.

A cross between an art fair and an exhibition, the production will focus on ways that the politically charged term woke butts heads with capitalist and corporate structures. In this context, woke articulates and then builds upon social awareness to give voice to otherwise silenced, unacknowledged, and underrepresented members of society. Significant enough in itself, it becomes even more important when economic entities shanghai the term for gains of profit and prestige. A perfect example - Dior markets a €620 T-shirt emblazoned with the otherwise woke-worthy phrase, “We Should All Be Feminists”

The fair will take place in a former gun powder factory that was once housed in Le Centre Tour à Plomb-Hageltoren, in the Anneessens district in the heart of Brussels.

Conceived in 2011 by Liv Vaisberg, Pieter Vermeulen, Bart Verschueren and Edouard Meier, POPPOSITIONS stakes a successful claim as the alternative art fair venue. The show convenes each year in a different venue. Each show, then, amounts to a site-specific installation and not an ​art emporium.

Capital of Woke will run from April 25—28, 2019 at Le Centre Tour à Plomb–Hageltoren, Slachthuisstraat 20–26 Rue de l’Abattoir, 1000 Brussels.

Selection Committee
• Diana Campbell Betancourt, Artistic Director at Samdani Art Foundation, (BD), Chief Curator at Dhaka Art Summit, (BD).
• Jessica Gysel © Joëlle-BachettaJessica Gysel, Founder of Girls Heart Brussels, (BE), Editor at Girls Like Us, Brussels/Amsterdam, (BE/NL).
• Niekolaas Johannes Lekkerkerk, Curator and writer at The Office for Curating, Rotterdam, (NL), Artistic Director of POPPOSITIONS, (BE).
• Hana Miletic Hana Miletić, Brussels and Zagreb based artist, (BE/HR).
• Christophe Veys Christophe Veys, Collection Veys-Verhaevert, (BE).

Participants.
• 1646, The Hague (NL)
• Archiraar Gallery, Brussels (BE)
• Billytown, The Hague (NL)
• Broodthaers Society of America, New York (US)
• Diamètre, Paris (FR)
• DMW Art Space, Antwerp/Borgerhout (BE)
• Drop City, Antwerp (BE)
• ESPAI TACTEL, Barcelona/València (ES)
• etHALL gallery, Barcelona (ES)
• feeelings, nomadic
• JOEY RAMONE, Rotterdam (NL)
• L.E.M.O.W. Editions & Multiples, Paris (FR)
• Lily Robert, Paris (FR)
• MAMA, Rotterdam (NL)
• Manoeuvre Kunstenplek vzw, Ghent (BE)
• Onomatopee Projects, Eindhoven (NL)
• Pierre Poumet, Bordeaux (FR)
• Salón ACME, Mexico (MX)
• SUPERDEALS, Brussels (BE)
• Syndicate, Los Angeles (US)
• The fridge, Sofia (BG)
• The Self Luminous Society, nomadic
• VITRINE, Basel/London (CH/UK)
• Vleeshal, Middelburg (NL)
• wildpalms, Düsseldorf (DE)

Below follows a conversation with Niekolaas Johannes Lekkerkerk, POPPOSITIONS co-director. (His 2018 conversation can be found here.) Also interviewed were Dries Segers, artist, Freek Lome, Founding Director of Onomatopee Projects, and Alice Sparkly Kat, artist.

JS: What’s your working definition of Woke? What does Capital refer to? How does it relate to Woke?

NJL: I think the term woke does not lend itself to a clear-cut definition or easy categorization. For POPPOSITIONS I have been working with the idea of woke as concerning raising social awareness, taking actions in response to dominant paradigms, acknowledging one’s privileges towards understanding the struggles of others, and giving space to social bodies that have been silenced, unacknowledged and underrepresented. Capital, in this context, stands for advanced capitalism and its far reaching management of the living, among the human. The relationship between the two, for this edition of POPPOSITIONS at least, is the tendency of corporations to assimilate ideological agendas and fields of political activity–feminism, ecology, gender, to name a few–and numb them of their radical aspirations towards freedom, equality and the betterment of the environment for the sake of financial benefit. These agendas are indexed on the vectors of advanced capitalism and stripped of their transformative potential; Trump holds the rainbow flag to feign his support for LGBTQ people, at Starbucks you can overcome you consumerist guilt by paying extra for your cappuccino in support of plantation farmers in Guatemala (but what happens with the profit, really), at Dior you can acquire a €620 T-shirt stating “We Should All Be Feminists”, and so on, and so forth.

JS: What made this framework the most relevant of other considered frameworks?

NJL: Considering that POPPOSITIONS is somewhat of a curious hybrid between an art fair and an exhibition I found it interesting to seek for certain subjects with societal impetus that we could embody ourselves, part market, part criticality and discourse. Problematic as that may be, and is, I think that a framework not entirely at ease with the nature of our operation, or a framework that is not resting all too comfortably in its category of being is desirable, compared to other subjects more withdrawn from what it means to be alive today.

JS: What was the Selection Committee’s criteria for choosing the 26 participants?

NJL: Artistic merit and the politicization of aesthetics (instead of the aesthetization of politics): not to illustrate matters of concern, but to embody and make them felt.

JS: What role does social media play in the complicated relationship between popularity and capitalism? Do you find it ironic how, in this ubiquitous Social Era, so many voices have been under- or misrepresented or otherwise ignored?

NJL: Yes, it’s the quantitative proliferation of differences; also the normative ethics of social media are arguably, by extension, an ongoing affirmation of common thinking and behavior: an image of a female nipple is pornography, a bare male chest is the undisputed standard.

JS: In terms of subject matter, themes, media (technology, especially), and installation, how does this show embody response and resistance to the Capital of Woke?

NJL: Most of the participants have submitted proposals and project that are address being woke and wokeness, verging from the notion of the human body as living currency, identity politics as lifestyle attribute, to discussions concerning feminism, queer, gender, blackness, migration, and post-colonialism. Some of the initiatives indeed represent and address these concerns, other embody them–like, for instance, the Brussels artist-collective feeelings or Grace Ndiritu’s project Coverslut (presented by Manoeuvre).

JS: This year’s POPPOSITIONS iteration takes place in a former gun powder factory? Was that a conscious choice? In general, are your sites chosen as much for their symbolic value as their physical attributes?

NJL: It’s a happenstance. The first edition I directed in 2017, titled Don’t Agonize, Organize!, around forms of political assembly through the arts in response to the rise in rightwing movements took place at the cultural center of a bank, the second edition In Watermelon Sugar (2018) addressing ecological instability was hosted in a decayed and former banana warehouse–a “beautiful” site for posing the question of what are the possibilities of life in capitalist ruins. The symbolism of the venues does however resonate with the respective frameworks, and we do like to “flirt” with these somewhat disputed territories and the (his)stories they once represented, although the framework is often there already, first.

JS: Do you envision a single walkaway from these 26 solo exhibitions? If yes, what? If not, why not?

NJL: On the level of individual visitors, depending on their backgrounds, epistemological maps and preconceived knowledges, I am inclined to think assemblies like these function more like a fragmentary prism, an amalgamation of sorts: I hope that our “occasional formation” will allow us to be generous and share perspectives and insights that may be carried away and be reflected upon elsewhere and at a later stage.