NOTHING NEW UNDER THE SUN — Collection Flemish Community KASK’s Curatorial Studies @TICK TACK, Antwerp

TICK TACK presents
NOTHING NEW UNDER THE SUN

Nothing New Under the Sun is an exhibition developed in collaboration with the Department of Culture, Youth and Media and curated by seven international curators from KASK’s Curatorial Studies programme.

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Taking its starting point in the depot of the Collection Flemish Community in Vilvoorde, the exhibition illuminates the movement of artworks between conservation, storage and display— bringing them, for a moment, into the public view of the City of Antwerp. Created in collaboration with the Department of Culture, Youth and Media, the exhibition displays works from the Collection of the Flemish Community, an extensive public collection from which artworks are loaned and entrusted to organizations within the public sector.

Both sunlight and artificial light are among the most damaging elements for many materials and techniques, causing fading, discoloration, or other degradation. In other words, every time an artwork is exhibited, it fulfills its purpose to be seen, yet it is exposed to damaging conditions. This tension lies at the heart of every collection but is hardly ever presented to the public. Rather than presenting a single art- historical narrative, Nothing New Under the Sun reveals what it means for a collection to be public: not fixed, but continually preserved, activated and shared through the systems that sustain it.

While artworks are moving into the brutalist building of TICK TACK named —The Sundial (1955, Léon Stynen)—a newly commissioned performance by Lily White and dancers Charlotte Dos Santos and Mina Verheyen unfolds at the depot. Like a house-swap, this intervention brings an embodied and live practice into the space usually reserved for the collection.

The fourteen artists in Nothing New Under the Sun were not chosen to illustrate a single thesis. They arrived here through the acquisition logic of a public institution — works purchased by the Flemish Community across the late 1970s, 1980s, and early 1990s, and held since in the depot in Vilvoorde. What they share is not a style, a generation, or a shared politics, but a common condition: they are all part of a collection that was built to be public, and that has largely not been seen.

That unevenness runs through the list in visible ways. Jacques Charlier, Liliane Vertessen, and Lucio Del Pezzo are well-documented figures with major institutional histories; Jean Loix and Miki Van der Eecken have barely entered the archival record. Richard Allen’s practice was at the centre of a significant moment in British art history; Dirk De Neef and Eric Vandepitte have circulated at the edges of visibility. The collection holds all of them with equal weight — the same depot shelving, the same preservation care, the same legal status as public property.

This is what a public collection actually looks like: not a curated canon, but a contingent accumulation — shaped by the attention and resources of a particular time, preserved for a future that keeps not arriving. Nothing New Under the Sun does not resolve this unevenness. It makes it visible.

Present as Object, Absent as Artwork: The Conservation of Transformations Instables

Waiting for the Gaze: Conservation and Participation in Transformations Instables

The Flemish Community Collection in Vilvoorde holds Transformations Instables, a Plexiglas work made by Francisco Sobrino in 1962.

It is a work conceived to exist in relation to the viewer: a work that activates through the observer’s movement, that changes form according to the distance, the angle, and the psycho-physiological condition of the person looking at it. In the absence of this relation, it remains in a potential state: present as an object, but not fully activated as an artwork.

Its placement in storage therefore raises a question that exceeds the individual case and bears more broadly on the conservation of contemporary art: what happens to a work conceived to exist in relation to the viewer when it is withdrawn from the gaze and placed in a controlled space for its preservation?

Unlike kinetic or installation works discussed in conservation literature for the role of movement, display, and viewer participation, Transformations Instables is a static work that produces optical effects through the perceptual relation with its observer. For this very reason, it represents a particularly compelling case for reflecting on the complexity of conservation that cannot be reduced to the protection of material alone.

Francisco Sobrino (1932–2014), born in Spain and trained in Argentina, moved to Paris in 1958, where he deepened his study of the Phenomenology of Perception and Information Theory at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique. Together with Horacio Garcia Rossi, Julio Le Parc, François Morellet, Joel Stein, and Yvaral, he founded GRAV (Groupe de Recherche d’Art Visuel) in 1961, one of the most active groups within the New Tendencies, alongside ZERO, Gruppo N, and Gruppo T. Known under the designations of New Tendencies, Kinetic Art, Programmed Art, and Op Art, from the late 1950s through the late 1960s, these artists built a dense transnational and transdisciplinary network. Their experimentation ranged from the construction of static, kinetic, and environmental works that, with close attention to light and space, placed the viewer’s perception and their interactions with the work at the centre.[1]

Within this shared framework, however, the forms through which viewer participation is activated differ from work to work. As in Transformations Instables, held in the depot, or in the Torsions (from ca. 1959) series by Antwerp-based artist Walter LeBlanc, the works are static, but the ocular movement of the observer, or their movement through space, generates perspectival play. Works such as Grazia Varisco’s Schema Luminoso Variable (1961–68) are instead motorised kinetic objects capable of continuously producing new geometric configurations. Others required the manual activation of the viewer, such as Rilievo

ottico-dinamico by Gruppo N (1962), through to immersive environments like the Programmed Room by Group Zero for the exhibition Kunst Licht Kunst (1966) at the Van Abbemuseum.[2]

Through the integration of technology, Gestalt psychology, Information Theory, Design, and Pedagogy, these artists aimed at constructing a shared phenomenological language: an objective, non-hierarchical, and accessible visual system that requires no prior competence to be experienced. The complexity of these movements rests on a common social, and perhaps utopian, principle: the authors design models whose interplays of light, movement, and optical illusion function to destabilise the viewer’s perception, compelling them to break out of the passivity produced by mass society. Through aesthetic experience, the aim is to render the viewer more capable of selecting and deciphering external stimuli, and therefore more conscious of the world around them.[3] This occurs through an active experience of the work, one that involves the viewer and makes them an integral part of the creative process.

The importance of viewer participation is such that it displaces the figure of the artist as individual genius, desacralising authorship and operating through collective work defining themselves as “aesthetic operators” or “aestheticians.”[4] The works were conceived as research experiments or prototypes whose aura was called into question by the use of industrial materials and the production of multiples, in favour of a more democratic art.[5]

Umberto Eco spoke of this experiments as ‘’open work’’: a scientifically programmed work that, through the subjective interaction of the viewer, becomes “open to an unlimited range of possible readings, each of which causes the work to acquire new vitality in terms of one particular taste or perspective, or personal performance.”[6] As Davide Boriani likewise observed, “without the user the work does not give out signals, it does not exist.”[7] The work’s existence in reality is fully realised only through the visitor’s observation; without this participation, the work remains incomplete, deprived of an essential part of its meaning.

The works of the New Tendencies have been studied from a conservation standpoint primarily with regard to their kinetic moving components and their related participatory function. As Reinhard Bek points out: “How do we incorporate artist intent into the preservation of kinetic works when such art is both performative and sculptural?”[12]

In Sobrino’s case, the static work generates movement through the optical effect perceptible according to the conservative conditions of the material’s structure, rather than through mechanical movement.

A second level of complexity thus emerges, intertwining with the first dilemma: plastic as a material to be conserved.

Plastic represents one of the most complex fields in contemporary conservation. It is a relatively young material compared to the long history of artistic techniques. One cannot expect conservators to have accumulated the same centuries of experience with its

behaviour as exists, for instance, for oil painting, bronze, or marble. Knowledge of these materials developed through centuries of practice, error, and repetition; what has survived over time is also what proved most durable. Plastic has little more than a hundred years of history, even as it has become increasingly central to contemporary artistic production. Many works made with industrial materials are today exhibiting forms of degradation that are drawing the attention of the scientific community. [13]

The difficulty of conserving plastic material lies in the multiplicity of polymeric structures: each type, defined by its specific chemical composition, reacts and degrades differently. The loss of the physico-chemical properties of polymers can cause yellowing, discolouration, or loss of glossy finish, primarily due to heat, light, humidity, and atmospheric pollution. Therefore: “If the work originates as a study of the effects of light, colour, and space, any alteration to its surface properties such as brilliance, opacity, or colour, can irreversibly modify its appearance. Even minor damage can compromise the work’s response to light and render it visually illegible”.[14]

Furthermore, works in transparent plastics are easily compromised and have low tolerance for impact; a fracture can irreversibly undermine the original effect. Restoring transparent materials presents the same difficulty as reconstructing broken glass, requiring intrusive and high-risk interventions.[15] Preventive conservation therefore becomes essential.

In an exchange of correspondence, Delia Sobrino, who manages Francisco Sobrino’s estate, described a conservation challenge linked to the adhesive that bonds the Plexiglas components together: itself likely an industrial material, it exhibits small white bubbles, compromising both the stability and the appearance of the works. [16] Any intervention with chemical solvents would risk further damaging the structure without prior in-depth analysis of the material. For these fragile works, targeted conservation is indispensable.

The paradox closes in on itself: if the material degrades, the optical effects on which the viewer’s perceptual experience depends are compromised. The work no longer produces the same visual variations, nor does it activate the same engagement. But if we keep it in the depot to protect it, we withdraw it from the perceptual relation and the social purpose for which it was conceived.

Taking into consideration the words of Giovanni Colombo, a member of Gruppo T and a key figure of the New Tendencies on the restoration of Strutturazione Pulsante (1961), offers a precedent. The artist declared that the replacement of certain parts was acceptable, provided the intervention restored the work’s movement through substitution without altering its technological level. In this way, according to the artist the conservation must privilege the maintenance of the work’s function over an absolute defence of its material integrity.[17]

There is no solution that resolves this tension. What emerges from the case of Transformations Instables is that its importance resides neither in materiality alone nor in the artist’s intention alone.

The most recent research favours an open, interdisciplinary approach, constructed case by case: study of the artist’s intention through documents, manifestos, interviews, and correspondence; scientific analysis of materials; rigorous documentation of every

intervention. Matter and concept, the integrity of the object and its participatory function, give rise to a productive tension, one that acknowledges that every conservation decision is already, inevitably, a critical interpretation of the work. This text is itself an example of how the discipline of conservation is, and must be, in continuous transformation: dynamic, transdisciplinary, attentive to art history, to past and present society, to context and to the artist’s intent.

For now, Transformations Instables rests in the depot, waiting to return to the light — and to find again the gaze without which it does not fully exist.

Notes

[1]Matthieu Poirier, ed., Francisco Sobrino (Paris: Dilecta, 2020).

[2] Francesca Pola, ed., Walter Leblanc (Brussels: Mercatorfonds, 2017) ; Kunst Licht Kunst (Eindhoven: Van Abbemuseum, 1966) ; Margit Rosen and Peter Weibel, eds., A Little Known Story About a Movement, a Magazine and the Computer’s Arrival in Art (Karlsruhe: ZKM; Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011).

[3] Vergine, Lea. L’arte cinetica in Italia. Rome: Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna, 1973.

[4] Emanuele Quinz, “From Program to Behavior: The Experience of Arte Programmata in Italy, 1958–68,” in Practicable: From Participation to Interaction in Contemporary Art, ed. Samuel Bianchini and Erik Verhagen (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2016), 91–111.

[5] Marta Previti, “Multiplied Works: Seriality and Anonymity in the Cine-visual Research of the 1960s,” Venezia Arti 30 (2021), https://doi.org/10.30687/VA/2385-2720/2021/07/007.

[6] Umberto Eco, The Open Work (1962), trans. Anna Cancogni (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), 21.

[7] Davide Boriani, quoted in Lea Vergine, Arte programmata e cinetica, 1953–1963: l’ultima avanguardia (Milan: G. Mazzotta, 1983), 80.

[8] Poirier, Matthieu, Francisco Sobrino. Parigi. Dilecta, 2020.

[9] T. Scholte, “Introduction” in Inside Installations: Theory and Practice in the Care of Complex Artworks, ed. T. Scholte and G. Wharton (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2011), 11.

[10] Cesare Brandi, Theory of Restoration, trans. Cynthia Rockwell (Florence: Nardini, 2005), 48.

[11] Sanneke Stigter, “Between Concept and Material: Working with Conceptual Art: A Conservator’s Testimony” (PhD thesis, Universiteit van Amsterdam, 2016), 7.

[12] Reinhard Bek, “A Question of KinEthics,” in Keep It Moving? Conserving Kinetic Art, ed. Rachel Rivenc and Reinhard Bek (Los Angeles: Getty Conservation Institute, 2018), 6.

[13] Odile Madden and Tom Learner, “Preserving Plastics: An Evolving Material, a Maturing Profession,” in Conservation Perspective , (Los Angeles: Getty Conservation Institute, 2014), 4–9.

[14] Oscar Chiantore and Antonio Rava, Conserving Contemporary Art: Issues, Methods, Materials, and Research (Los Angeles: Getty Conservation Institute, 2013), 46.

[15] Anna Laganà and Rachel Rivenc, “Less Is More: Exploring Minimally Invasive Methods to Repair Plastic Works of Art,” Conservation Perspectives (2014): 16–17.

[16] Delia Sobrino, email correspondence with the author, 16 march 2026.

[17] Valentina Grillo, “Conservare l’arte contemporanea”, Luxflux 11 (2004): [pagine se disponibili].Luxflux, accessed [04/04/2026], http://www.luxflux.net/conservare-l%E2%80%99-arte-contemporanea/.

LILY WHITE (Choreography)
SCRUM, 2026
Performed by — Mina Verheyen and Charlotte Dos Santos Music by — Jan Segers
Filmed and edited by — Sammuel Nijhuis
Focus puller — Alexander Siamandi
Photographer — Lies Ooms

NOTHING NEW UNDER THE SUN

Collection Flemish Community KASK’s Curatorial Studies @TICK TACK, Antwerp
April 03 — 25 , 2026

Artists: Dirk De Neef, Eric Vandepitte, Erich Weiss, Filip Claus, Jacques Charlier, Jean Loix, Johan Swinnen, Karel Fonteyne, Liliane Vertessen, Lucio Del Pezzo, Malou Van Braeckel, Marie- Christine Huybrechts, Miki Van der Eecken, and Richard Allen.

Performance: Lily White, Charlotte Dos Santos, and Mina Verheyen.

Curated by: Alice Zitelli, Antoine Meffre Chol, Emma Crombé, Eline Adriaensen, Nora Franco, Tess Ego, and Zinnia Fay Fay.

Photography: All images copyright and courtesy of their respective authors, photographers and, where applicable, the gallery.

TICK TACK ➔

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