When the European world thinks of Africa it often lumps it together as one whole without distinction of creed or country. And it struck me on a recent visit to Bruges’ cultural festival that the rest of the world may very well speak of Europe in the same way.
European identity is a powerful component in one of the main exhibitions that makes up the Bruges Central festival.
Since becoming the European Capital of Culture in 2002, Bruges city council has adopted a policy “to show the city as more than old masters” but also as a lively, creative and contemporary world city.
So it is that the city invited the Belgian artist Luc Tuymans to be the guest curator of the contemporary art show that runs across five venues stretching across its inner area.
In A Vision of Central Europe (until 23 January), Tuymans has selected more than 40 European artists (with one Japanese artist) from the 1940s to now to juxtapose east and west Europe, questioning who had the power during war and who now holds power.
The exhibition is a personal interpretation drawing on memory and the pains of history. Tuymans explained that he “lost a lot of friends in the Balkan Wars of Eastern Europe”.
The core piece of the exhibition, or what Tuymans calls the “emotional spot of the show”, is the Polish painter Andrzej Wroblewski’s work, whose agony of seeing his father shot by the Nazi regime is sharply depicted in Execution and leaves little to the imagination.
During my visit I found myself questioning what or where central Europe is? There seems to be no single answer. The exhibition includes artists from the US and the UK.
From my research the term broadly takes in the countries that have in the past few years joined the EU - Hungary, Poland, Romania, Bulgaria, and so on. But it can also include Germany.
I like one description of central Europe being the part considered eastern by Western Europe and western by Eastern Europe.
