Leo van Vegchel

All artworks anticipate the future, from the impact on the audience to the whimsical judgement of time. Leo van Vegchel plays with this anticipation. Fully aware that only change is eternal, he is transforming all the works he still owns to release them into the world. He places his wax, wood or bronze statues into custom-made clay containers which are fired at high temperature. What remains of the pieces stays inside the container; a transfer image refers to their original form. Van Vegchel also traces his drawings with pigmented ink, in order to transfer them onto clay slabs that he shapes into ceramic scrolls. He gives away everything, asking people to bury the works in anonymous places. Relying on the durability of ceramics, he turns his work into enigmatic objects for future archaeologists to find, a laborious project that recognises and defies transience in a single gesture.

Anna Orlikowska

Domenico Mangano |3

Elena Giolo

Yun Choi

Özgür Atlagan

A trolley in Özgür Atlagan’s EKWC studio is full of ceramic fragments. Black pieces on the top shelf, white pieces below, offset by a few bright red plastic cups. It’s beautiful, although it’s not a work, or is it? Atlagan’s installations are subtle, spontaneous, they evade easy interpretation but communicate nonetheless. The fragments are cut out from rectangular slabs to form floor plans of palaces where a headless child is being kept. Writing the story from room to room, removing clay, leaving traces, Atlagan advances through these symbols of power that hide their oppressive nature behind luxurious pomp. His own head turns up everywhere, scanned and moulded the size of a thumbnail, or printed larger and used to impress his astonished features on a lump of clay. Ceramic sheets are draped over absent shapes. Clay faces on a seesaw alternately disappear under water, until they wash away.

Arjan van Helmond

Marien Schouten |8

Wen-Hsuan Lin

Larissa Esvelt

Portugal’s colonial past is inextricably intertwined with the azulejo culture the country is so proud of. Larissa Esvelt, whose Portuguese father was born in Angola, crossed the cities of Lisbon and Porto to document the countless historical tileworks in public spaces, palaces and churches. The thousands of photographs she took served as inspiration for a series of figures she materialised during her EKWC residency. Esvelt wanted to transfigure the two-dimensional paintings of the azulejos to three-dimensional sculptures arranged in a theatrical, architectural setting. Pièce de résistance is a large female nude reclining on a pedestal that is part rock, part tilework. Her head a mask, her body an empty skin – not yet fully rounded out, or squeezed out and discarded? – she confronts the viewer with an impenetrable gaze. Remnants of chains and glazes emulating weathered azulejos suggest that time is still a long way from healing all wounds.