2018 is the year of the new edition of the Bruges Triennale: as is the case every three years, the city centre will see tourists coming face to face with works of art. Fifteen pieces, installations and meeting places (one of them, BRUG, created by the artist Jarosław KOZAKIEWICZ) have been put together to make a route which leads visitors to unexpected places in the city. Beyond the desire to show the work of established and up-and-coming artists, there is also a wish to generate encounters and not remain passive when confronted with works of art, but rather to experience them and participate in their creative process.
The theme of the Bruges Triennale 2018 is Liquid City, based on the concept of liquid society developed by the Polish-British sociologist Zygmunt BAUMAN. In 2015, the last editon of the Triennale had imagined the city as a megalopolis. This time, it is going one step further by asking itself to what extent an historic city such as Bruges can be flexible, liquid, resiliant, at a time when nothing seems certain.
It is on the basis of this topic that artists conducted research, hoping to find inspiration for their works whilst considering the role of the liquid element which literally crosses and surrounds the city. This water, which is what lends Bruges its world renown, is the metaphor behind Liquid City.

PRACTICAL INFORMATION
>>> various places in Bruges’s historic centre – you can find a map of the city put together for the Triennale HERE
>>> Saturday 5 May > Sunday 16 September 2018 – the installations and exhibitions can be accessed every day from 12h until 18h

+++ see pictures below
+++ find all practical information on the triennale site
+++ take a regular look at the triennale timetable to make sure you don’t miss a single event during the festival!

---

Jarosław Kozakiewicz
Kozakiewicz graduated in Sculpture from the Warsaw Aacdemy of Art in 1989 and currently teaches there. He combined his studies with a scholarship at Cooper Union for the advancement of science and art in New York. In 1997, he received his doctorate in art. In 2004, his work received the prize from the Pokaz Critics’ Association. Six years later, he represented Poland in the tenth International Architecture Biennale in Venice.

In Bruges, visitors can cross the water on his installation entitled BRUG (The Bridge). With the many bridges that span the canals in the city centre and link neighbourhoods with each other, BRUG by Jarosław Kozakiewicz is a contemporary interpretation with another function. Instead of bricks and cobblestones, the artist uses metal profiles and canvas to create a bridge on which you can cross from one side of the canal to the other. This does not mean, however, that you can simply continue your journey. The bridge brings you closer to the statue of Niobe by Constant Permeke, to a place where you can pause briefly but then have to retrace your steps.The installation is a place of encounter, an alternative spot to cross paths and even start a conversation. The structure’s design is based on a proportional system in which every intersection of two lines points to a point on a human face. Every corner, every connection is a snapshot of a movement: two faces approaching each other – a geometrical metaphor both for a mutual encounter of two human beings and a meeting between the future and the past.Relationships between people and their deep meaning are a starting point for artistic experiment that Kozakiewicz has been engaged in for a few years. The project is based on searching for new sculpting and para-architectural forms by manipulation of a module created by joining the orifices of the human head. Bodily orifices are a metaphor of “the inner life”, they represent the entrance to the world of personal experience. The borders/ passages are both first and last moments of mutual encounters.