Daniel Buren

Using letters from famous visitors to Paris - Charles Baudelaire, Walter Benjamin, Rainer Maria Rilke - the magical image of the city of lights is linked to that of a banal consumerism. A visual essay about the experience of observing and being observed in a Paris with many faces.

For the television film Highway N°1, Jef Cornelis once again worked with architecture critic Geert Bekaert, who provided the screenplay. The film, which paints a portrait of the highway between Antwerp and Mechelen – and specifically the stretch between Kontich and Walem – deals with spatial planning on either side of an important Belgian arterial road, the first state highway in Belgium.

The film De straat (The Street) opens with scenes of a protest in a street. Right after, we see aerial views of a busy highway. The narrator's words say it all: 'The street has become nothing more than a highway – a movement machine, as Le Corbusier called it. The heart of the city, the street, has turned into nothing but a space for traffic.' The car has ruined both the street and community life, and the footage hits this message home. Shots of Belgian cities overrun by cars and trucks are mixed with peaceful clips of Italian towns, where kids spend their whole day playing outside. In short, the film is a powerful critique of motorized traffic in our cities

The first part of a Magritte portrait, mainly compiled from fragments of staged enactments of situations, which Magritte recorded with, among others, Georgette Magritte, Paul Colinet, Irène Hamoir and Scutenaire, playfully described by the latter as "une histoire érotico-fantastico-iconoclaste".

Held in Kassel between June and October 1972, documenta 5 was organized by “master curator” Harald Szeeman, and remains one of the most important international exhibitions of the last few decades. Entitled Interrogation of Reality—Picture Worlds Today, it brought together works by Marcel Broodthaers, Christian Boltanski, Arnulf Rainer, Claes Oldenburg, Gerhard Richter, and Ed Ruscha, and could be considered the first instance of an “exhibition as spectacle.” Introducing the different sections (“Artists’ Museums,” “Individual Mythologies”) and protagonists, the film is both a report on the trends and pacesetters of the time, and an approach to the phenomenon of documenta, sidestepping and questioning the definitions of exhibition makers, as well as of artists, of an exhibition, and of contemporary art.

This documentary includes an interview with Byars during his stay in Antwerp in 1969 in which the artist reflects on the objectives of some of his performances and the means employed in them. It also includes recordings of various performances like "Two in a Hat", "75 in a Hat", and "The Pink Silk Airplane".