Dear Friends,

China and Needcompany. I fear there’s something going on between us. The quite thrilling tour of this gigantic country with "Isabella’s room" in 2013 engendered some very close ties. I am now working on a solo exhibition commissioned by McaM, the new museum of contemporary art and performance in Shanghai headed by the artist Qiu Zhijie. The whole museum has been put at our disposal. ‘By ‘our’ I mean of course that I shall be accompanied by Needcompany’s associated artists. The title of the exhibition is ‘I like the Chinese people and the Chinese people like me’. The double lie in this title is the only political act I am allowing myself. After all, I come from a democratically governed country where every major city has a statue in honour of a mass-murderer, so I thought a degree of modesty would not be misplaced. The exhibition will open with 3 days of durational performances. This is a first for China. Improvisation has not yet become part of communist culture. So the negotiations on this element are probing and precise. In China, the view of public space is different from that in Europe. By way of preparation, I gave a series of talks in Shanghai on performance and visual art in the free West. Among other things I spoke about the Wiener Aktionisten, Marina Abramović and Joseph Beuys, I was in full swing when someone in the audience asked this question: ‘If you are so free in the West, why is your art so depressive?’ I have to admit I was stuck for an answer. And now I’ve been thinking about it for the last three months. The collapse of the visual arts in Europe in a nutshell. In China, an artist is considered important and the state keeps an eye on him. In the West, art has ended up on the periphery of cultural discussion. When Ivo Dimchev has his friend fellate him at the Kaaitheater or Paul McCarthy sets up a butt plug as a Christmas tree in the centre of Paris, could anyone care less? And this is probably one of the reasons why Western art has become so depressive. As artists we have to take more account of the importance of public space. We too often confuse the free world with the free market. Public space has been taken over by entertainment. My great example is Goya, who himself considered his Pinturas negras unfit for public spaces. The art that he showed, in this case done on commission, had a public, societal story to tell. His black paintings had to do with his need, and he kept them to himself. This was not about self-censorship, but a full awareness of the societal significance of public space. We live in a different era, of course, and the artist’s task has changed. We might even say that there is no longer a task and that this is the heart of the problem. An artist who does not make himself of service is not worthy of the name. Needcompany receives subsidies and so we have a responsibility to fulfil. Our task is, among other things, to make difficult, well-considered and critical work and to present it in a ‘socially’ sound manner. People often say to me that these subsidies allow me the luxury of distancing myself from the art market, but they forget that this ‘luxury’ is a political and social choice for which one has to struggle hard. After all, Needcompany is a public space too. And that was one of the reasons why the head curator Qiu Zhijie hands his museum over to us for 10 weeks. We are going to create a new public space in the museum, one that is entirely private in a country where ‘public’ has a completely different meaning. We are proud that Needcompany has been given this assignment and are currently working day and night in the formidable borough of Molenbeek to create as much beauty as possible. Beauty is after all still a weapon and elsewhere in this newsletter you can read where we shall be confronting you with it in the near future.

JL

2016 will be a very varied year for Needcompany, with new creations by Maarten Seghers, Lemm&Barkey, Kuiperskaai and MaisonDahlBonnema, and a solo exhibition by Jan Lauwers at Mingyuan Contemporary Art Museum (McaM), the brand new museum of contemporary art and performance in Shanghai.

Maarten Seghers, together with the arch-shaman Fritz Welch, the desperate drummer Nicolas Field, the masterly cellist Simon Lenski and the immovable time-bomb Mohamed Toukabri, is working on an invocatory song entitled O. The premiere will be at Monty in Antwerp on 18 March and after that the performance can be seen at the FIDENA Festival in Bochum, the Latitudes Contemporaines Festival in Lille, Künstlerhaus Mousonturm in Frankfurt and humain TROP humain CDN in Montpellier.

A month later, Monty will host the premiere of "The Winter’s Tale", in which Kuiperskaai tackles Shakespeare’s winter fairytale. Needcompany is offering this young company its support for the first time.

Jan Lauwers is the first Belgian to be given a solo exhibition at the McaM, the museum of contemporary art, in Shanghai. He is in fact the first international artist to be invited to hold a major exhibition there. It is called ‘I like the Chinese people and the Chinese people like me’ and will also involve Needcompany’s associated artists. The exhibition opens on 20 May 2016 and runs for 10 weeks. The opening will be accompanied by the marathon performance The House of Our Fathers.

In the meantime, The blind poet will in the next few months be on tour to Heidelberg, Freiburg, Valladolid, Basel, Bruges, Antwerp etc.

"The result is a large tale with great characters who, as if they came straight out of a deep and extravagant dream, paint an accurate story of history, identity, immigration and the acceptance of others." - La Nación (Argentina)

"FOREVER" by Lemm&Barkey and "The Moon" by MaisonDahlBonnema will have their premieres in the autumn. You will hear more about them in the next newsletter.

We also welcome the latest additions to the Needcompany family: Maru and Noah.