Feast of Fools.

Pieter Bruegel is often seen as the embodiment of Flemish identity. Why has that been so since the revival of his work around 1900? How has he grown to become an icon, an inexhaustible source of inspiration and a huge cliché? In the exhibition ‘Feast of Fools. Bruegel Rediscovered’ the visitor becomes acquainted with a series of key works by Flemish and international artists who ‘have a thing for Bruegel’. They latch onto his themes, reinterpret them, quote him … and thus demonstrate that his work has lost none of its relevance. Bruegel, the misunderstanding Feast of Fools. Bruegel Rediscovered takes as its starting point ‘the great misunderstanding’, when Bruegel, in the last years of the Romance era, was proclaimed a painter of peasant psalms, crackling snow landscapes and eternally rustling cornfields, with his roots firmly in the Flemish clay. The exhibition inquires the way in which Flemish, and by extension Belgian and international artists, handled his artistic legacy in the period between and after the wars. Hence we focus on James Ensor, Valerius De Saedeleer, Jules De Bruycker, Gustave Van de Woestyne, Frits Van den Berghe, Jean Brusselmans, Constant Permeke, Anto Carte, Otto Dix, Stijn Streuvels, August Sander, Hubert Malfait and George Grosz. Bruegel, today At the same time, Feast of Fools. Bruegel Rediscovered pulls out various contemporary stops, with art, video and music. In collaboration with curators Luk Lambrecht and Lieze Eeneman, a series of artists have been invited to delve into the themes from Bruegel’s work or into the interpretation of them by the generation of rediscoverers. Included artists are Lázara Rosell Albear, Kasper Bosmans, Dirk Braeckman, Ricardo Brey, Daniel Buren, Carlos Caballero, Anetta Mona Chişa & Lucia Tkáčová, Leo Copers, Jimmie Durham, Christoph Fink, Jan Van Imschoot, Bart Lodewijks, Hana Miletić, Yola Minatchy, Elisabeth Ida Mulyani, Honoré d’O, Ornaghi & Prestinari, Jonathan Paepens, Emmanuelle Quertain, Kurt Ryslavy, Sam Samiee, Pascale Marthine Tayou, Grazia Toderi, Yurie Umamoto, Birde Verheerswynghels, Peter Verhelst & Anneleen Boehme and Gosie Vervloessem. 
These creations will be linked to relevant existing work of Marcel Broodthaers, Mario Merz, Panamarenko and Franz West. Studio Job is also creating a new sculpture for this exhibition, referring to the porridge bowl that can be seen on some of Bruegel’s festive paintings. Bruegel, worldwide The exhibition continues with a creation by Rimini Protokoll, one of Berlin’s most creative theater companies. They develop a video installation, with Virtual Reality-glasses, that forms an interactive and immersive counterpoint to the exhibition trajectory. Rimini Protokoll focuses on ‘Feast of Food’. While Bruegel was alive, food was still produced close to the consumer, only gradually exotic products found their way to our tables. This had radically changed in the 21st century: the families of farmers, as depicted by Bruegel, have turned into high-tech agro-industries and the food we buy in supermarkets has become a highly customized product whose origins most of us ignore. Meanwhile, the world population has doubled in the last 50 years. Rimini Protokoll embarks on a research to find out what farming and food production look like today. You, as a visitor, will be submerged into a world in which people work for us, far from our own kitchens: from Rungis – near Paris, the biggest food market in the world – to a gigantic slaughterhouse in Bavaria or plantations in Almería.