Mark Manders: The Absence of Mark Manders

The Absence of Mark Manders unfolds in the Woning Van Wassenhove. This is a post-Brutalist house for a bachelor designed by Juliaan Lampens in 1974. In jarring contrast to prevailing depictions of clean and mostly empty Brutalist interiors, the original occupant, Albert Van Wassenhove, who lived there until his passing in 2012, stuffed the house to hoarder-like proportions.

The Absence of Mark Manders treats Lampens’s architecture with the dignity of the permanent sculpture that it is, while also putting forth Van Wassenhove’s logic of accumulation. Although Manders has hardly touched some spaces, he treats the bed, office, and kitchen as stages for aggregation in line with the original occupant’s mindset: drawings, architectural proposals, photographs, artworks, paint pots, and seemingly wet clay are piled on top of one another. These spaces have been used as an artist’s studio, unveiling traces of a temporary occupant living in, and thinking with, Lampens’s architecture.

“The aim is to show the house in a perfect situation. While some spaces derail when you zoom in on them, there is a kaleidoscopic element to them, as if you are looking inside a head.” —Mark Manders

— Visitors must book a time slot in advance.
— max. 8 visitors per hour.

The exhibition is curated by Laurens Otto and made possible with the generous support of the Government of Flanders, the Mondriaan Fonds, The Dutch Embassy in Belgium, and Puilaetco.

Images: Mark Manders – The Absence of Mark Manders. Photo: Tim Van de Velde.
Woning Van Wassenhove © Juliaan Lampens.