Current exhibition

The current exhibition is called “A day without laughter… is a day wasted” (Charlie Chaplin) and was developed as part of our employees’ return to their offices after many months of absence because of the coronavirus pandemic. 

Despite the multiple technological tools that enabled us to pursue our professional activities and stay in touch with each other, teleworking sometimes became synonymous with isolation, worry and uncertainty. The need and the desire to meet face-to-face was keenly felt by everyone. The world of work is often associated with such notions as responsibility, profitability and stress, it inspires seriousness but by bringing humour through art in the workplace it also seeks to unite employees around cohesion and motivation. A company’s success also depends on the involvement and solidarity of all its employees. 

“Laughter has a thousand ways of breaking out. It is protean. It comes as a surprise, in reaction to material, plastic, gestural or behavioural disorder. Laughter is immune. It resolves visual imbalances. We laugh to warn the other, to salvage a world of standards that is teetering, a system of habits that is crumbling. Anything that challenges shared rules provokes laughter. If art has a sense of humour (let’s bet it does!), it is because it challenges us with unbalanced situations that tickle the norms of our common world. Humour in this sense is joyfully anarchistic, in the literal sense of the word. The artists in the exhibition “A day without laughter” are artisans of humorous disorder. They practice a generous, overturning, subtle humour, which crosses materials, bodies and situations."

Text by Maud Hagelstein, FNRS researcher in philosophy and lecturer at the Université de Liège 

Guest curator: Harry Gruyaert, photographer and artist