Night of performances

To mark the last weekend of the exhibition and Museum Night Fever, La Loge presents an evening of performances by two guest artists whose work resonates with the exhibition. Doris Hardeman will explore cognitive states of (non-) performativity as a way of addressing our collective tendency towards compulsive productivity. Reflecting on Thu-Van Tran’s film 24 hours in Hanoi, a “theatre of reappearances”, her performance will conjure up a waking dream, a chance to delve into storytelling through memory, positing melancholy as a state of in-between. Alex Deforce’s audio intervention will interweave electronic sounds and fragments of poetry, creating an immersive, meditative experience.

Biographies

Doris Hardeman (1993) lives and works in Brussels and Geneva. Through paying close attention to the broad versatility of materials in terms of craftsmanship and the mass production industries, the work of Doris Hardeman plays with the utility and original value of her chosen materials, amplifying connotations concerning the industrial manufacturability of our present time. Both on a material and conceptual level, her practice explores our present-day Western obsession with authenticity. The term authenticity, functioning here as a nostalgia-driven ideology aiming to escape a catastrophe-ridden future doomed by late capitalism, serves as a lens through which she considers its influence on cultural trends. Considering how different contemporary aesthetics are classified in terms of uniqueness and transgression versus tradition, she tries to understand how the hierarchisation of her subjects defines how we shape our collective memory. She studied at the Royal Academy of Art in the Hague [KABK] and obtained her master’s degree at the University of Art and Design in Geneva [HEAD].

Alex Deforce (1984) debuted as a poet in January 2019 with Nachtdichter, by Victor De Roo, released on the Amsterdam-based label Knekelhuis. The same year, he was featured on Brihang’s Casco album, for which he recited poems by Georges Perec. In September 2020, his first solo 7” vinyl was released on Lexi Disques. Once a month, Alex Deforce hosts Nonchalance Calculée, a radio show about poetry, bar culture, and the Brussels dialect , on Kiosk Radio.. During the lockdown, Alex Deforce was part of the Dichters van wacht project and he saw his first poem published in the Paris-based literary volume The Opiate” In 2022 Les Editions Deforce saw the light of day. In 2024, the album Kwart voor straks, a collaboration with Charlotte Jacobs, was released by the renowned label Stroom. In September 2024, his first book was published by Poëziecentrum: Tussenbruggen is a ‘bingewalk’ of clashing interests and wringing generational switches.” The poem was published in five languages: Dutch, French, English, Brusseleir, and Arab.