The exhibition project Middle Gate II – The Story of Dymphna is a collaboration between M HKA (Museum of Contemporary Art Antwerp) and the cultural centre de Werft in Geel. Middle Gate II is the follow up to the exhibition Middle Gate, curated by Jan Hoet in Geel in 2013. The exhibition concept is closely tied to the legend of the holy Dymphna, saint of the possessed, the mentally ill and patroness against epilepsy and insanity. The legend of Dymphna shares a strong connection to the identity of Geel, "the charitable city".

Nadia Naveau

(c)image: Nadia Naveau
A Random Sample, 2012
Sculpture , 390 x 285 x 180 cm
ceramic, epoxy, wood, sandpaper, clay, plasticine, paper, polyester, iron, plexi

In the three-dimensional collage A Random Sample we recognise her composite, eclectic and multiform method, which does not disappear as a result of being transformed into clay and cast in a single material. The work as a whole is made up of boxes, baking trays, a slab of expanded polystyrene, sculptures in clay, Plastiline, epoxy, terracotta and ceramics, colour and glaze tests, perforated planks, English sweets (Liquorice Allsorts), framed collages with sandpaper, and numerous other things left over from Naveau’s sculptural activities, pushed aside, rejected for the time being, waiting in purgatory for approval to exist officially. Here and there we see the birth of a figure, lost in the ruins of the Hessenhuis, such as Yves Klein’s imprints of women or Hugo Heyrmans and Panamarenko’s Feltra, which came into being eight years after 1958. It’s odd how fashions change, how some approaches can fall out of grace and then come back into acceptance again. History is an inextricable tangle of forms and ideas, in which our experiences with the works form the only reality. (Hans Theys, 2012)