The Belgian artist Hugo Roelandt was one of the pioneers of performance art in Belgium in the seventies and eighties. He was an artist's artist who operated outside of the art market and who had a keen eye on the developments in society. By combining his vision of photography and performance art, Roelandt developed a personal mixture of performance and installation art which he referred to as post performance.
Hugo Roelandt donated part of his legacy to the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp, where he was a photography teacher. Both his partner, Lydia Van Loock, and the Academy decided to preserve the artist's archive as a whole in the form of a research platform and donate it to the M HKA. The museum will use its knowledge and expertise to conserve, document and make the artist's archive accessible to contemporary artists, students, researchers and the general public.
The archive starts in 1973 and runs to 2015. This presentation shows archival material and objects from the eighties and revisits projects such as Auto Matic Art Project (Brussels, 1983), Circulation(Brussels, 1983 / Waasmunster, 1985) and Pavimenti (Antwerp, 1987 ). In addition, a re-performance of Aigua Bellugada/The Shape of Water (1985) will be presented on the roof terrace.