© Ans Mertens
‘huiswerk homework’
27-29 march 2025
Opening hours: 7:30pm - 10:30pm during the show
Contact: janknops@atelierarthurrogiers.be / 0032494417070
Address: Keizer Karelstraat 103 - 1000 Brussels
Metro: 1 en 5 (Schuman)
Bus: 28 - 61 (Ardense Jagers) 64 (Luther)
60 - 63 (Ambiorix)
Unused rushes, a fragment of a recent work and a failed camera test. For ‘huiswerk homework’, Ans Mertens searched for traces of failure in her recent practice. Reading Simone Weil’s writing on attention and education, she took Weil’s advice to heart to “contemplate attentively and slowly each homework in which [she had] failed.” For Atelier Arthur Rogiers, Ans Mertens proposes a show where art practice and the domestic sphere coincide as a place of looking and learning.
The work of Ans Mertens plays on the tension between objective recordings and subjective image-making. The lone gaze of her lens surveys a scene, seemingly disembodied. Yet we cannot but identify with it; what is being shown is always that which already has been seen. Mertens plays with proximity and remoteness, the spatial dynamics that attract our attention and draw the eye to understand visibility as a fleeting condition of the things surrounding us.
The work of Ans Mertens also shows that time, perhaps more than space, is the ultimate subject of all film: time captured, time chased. Arranged, erased, wasted. Leisurely spent, unspectacularly passed. (Text: S. Saelemakers)
Ans Mertens (living and working in Antwerp) is a visual artist investigating the intersection of time, film, and the exhibition space. She currently works on her artistic/practice-based PhD project “The (dis)appearance of time, on exhibiting Kairos” at LUCA School of Arts & KU Leuven. Recently she showed her work at M HKA, Cultuurhuis De Warande, Out of Sight, Museum M, Level Five Brussels, Sonic Acts & Engauge Film Festival, among others. She is also a co-founding artist of URSULA, a collective of women working with the moving image.