Verbeke Foundation

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Took the double decker train to Etten-Leur where I met Linda and her boyfriend Erwin. Linda is a good friend of my exchange student and both were really lovely people! They organised a day out for me in Antwerp, Belgium to visit the weird and wonderful museum that is Verbeke Foundation. As we crossed the boarder from the Netherlands to Begium, the roads got bumpier. The surrounding grounds of the museum looked like a dump site and the building itself was a freezing cold warehouse with an overgrown green house. The gerenal theme was to bring nature and ecology together. The exhibition had a large collection of dead animal installations, stuffed, rotting and other half carcasses hanging and stretched out to create a somewhat disturbing installation. Some works were inspired and copies of Damien Hurst's pieces, so I was told. I read statements of 'Modern art- who cares?' 'Copyright is for losers' 'It's not where you take things from- it's where you take them to' Luc Godard. Covering issues such as test tube babies, science's definitions of living and dead, real fur coats and lists of the dead.
There were a few pieces that reminded me of my tutor's work, Kimberly Foster, which I'd seen in the Sainsbury Center in Norwich. Although not interactive, these were dissembled objects put together with other objects to change the function of it.
"Our exhibition space will be no oasis. Our presentation was unfinished, moving, unpolished, contradictory, messy, complex, onharmonieus, onmonumentaal and live like the world outside the museum walls." Geert Verbeke
Having said all this I really enjoyed the exhibition for its originality and felt as if we found this place ourselves, as if we stumbled across an abandoned site. I saw what looked like space ships in the car park which I was later told visitors could stay overnight in?! (But it is very expensive!)

Then we drove back to the Netherlands, stopping off at Hulst for a drink with poffertjes and oliebollen! The Dutch sure like their sweet things. I saw Linda's farm where she lives and met some of her family, then they drove me back home, to Breda.

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