"THE VIEW brings together a selection of 41 works between 1970 and 2021 in an unusual arrangement. The exhibition is an attempt to reflect the enchanting diversity of the Servais Family Collection. In this exhibition, I was most interested in avoiding a geopolitical framework and instead centralising the question: “How can we live together?” The most important thing for me was understanding how the exhibition might present this question along with a possible answer. The result is an outcome that I see as being both positive yet nuanced. It aims to offer a distinctive outlook on an uncertain future amid political turmoil and growing public dissent.

‘The View’ is a figure of speech that requires two things: an outlook onto something, maybe onto a city, a river, a landscape and the spot from where that outlook emerges. The distance between those two points, we call a perspective. The use of the word perspective is a rather open-ended project. It can be used to give someone a push out of their own world view, you might say “have a bit of perspective” but the history of perspective begins, as many young art history undergraduates will know, in the 15th century in Renaissance Italy. It is understood to be the joint invention of the Italian architect Filippo Brunelleschi and Italian writer Leon Battista Alberti. Together, they brought to life a mathematical way of seeing called ‘linear perspective’ and it is through this system that we understand sight, both real and represented. But most saliently, it is through artistic practice that we have arrived here.

Overall, the exhibition underlines the abstracted and fragmented quality of our current epoch. Attempting to seek a single view of our current reality is a feat that is, certainly, too optimistic, but it is an early negotiation of how a contemporary art collection can, more broadly, situate itself within the socio-economic realities of the present and future. As we enter a new epoch that is fundamentally uncertain, the role of art-making, curating and collecting are constantly up for debate, questioned, and even censored. An uncertain future is a productive challenge that requires new, inclusive and discursive models for thinking and for creating that THE VIEW proposes to platform."

THE VIEW
Curated by Nicolaus Schafhausen

April 2024 - March 2025
At the Loft, Servais Family Collection

Artists: Cemile Sahin, Damian Hirst, Eloise Hawser, Hank Willis Thomas, Hans Eijkelboom, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Icaro Zorbar, Pravdoliub Ivanov, Jean-Marc Bustamante, Jeremiah Johnson, Josephine Meckseper, Adel Abdessemed, Ariel Orozco, Bodys Isek Kingelez, Cian Dayrit, Cildo Meireles, Hassan Sharif, Ismaël Bazri, John Gerrard, Lungiswa Gqunta, Miguel Rio Branco, Ndayé Kouagou, Oscar Munoz, Philipp Timischl, Rose Salane, Shilpa Gupta, Alex Burke, Alison Rossiter, Anastasiya Yarovenko, Daniela Ortiz, Jenny Holzer, Kapwani Kiwanga, Kader Attia, Laurel Nakadate, Mika Rottenberg and John Kessler, Oscar Santillan, Wim Delvoye, Zuza Golinska.