The Brusselsprouts

I will be straightforward here. Luxembourg never particularly struck me as a place to have fun. I often rant about how it’s too small and how it lacks attractive exciting things to see & do. Now I know at least one place that’s awesome enough to make me want to go to Luxembourg more often. Yes, you misbelievers, read on and you’ll learn all about MUDAM, the city’s -I mean country’s- Museum of Modern Art.

As it happens, on Sunday Marly and I went there for brunch (you know Marly from our Ibiza and Formentera adventures) and ended up having lots of fun in the Museum.

This is not going to be a review of the Mudam or its collections, we’re not going to make you a virtual tour. But here are our impressions and take on the Museum.

Our absolute art-crush: the South Korean artist Lee Bul.
She truly inhabits the museum with different creations in various spaces.
She began her career in the 80’s with a series of performances in which she wore monstruous soft fabric tentacular dresses.

Largely inspired by the notion of utopia, Lee Bul creates large floor installations where the observer becomes unsettled and dwells into doubt and retrospection. The mirrored walls create infinite reflections and a new reality emerges. Utopia?

Entering the ‘La Via Negativa’, you get lost into light. Mirrors and light bulbs distorts reality and you find yourself in a sort of joy transe.

I really enjoyed her work.
It’s beautiful and it moves you.
Makes you play with the piece.
Interacts with you, shouts out to you.

After a moment’s rest on one of the ‘Audiolab’ couches, where kids happily volunteered to take our pic…

Audiolab: where architecture meets sound design

…we continued our pilgrimage upstairs, into ‘s ‘Chapelle’.

Chappelle, 2006

Delvoye is a Belgian artist who’s become an expert in abolishing the distinctions between beautiful & ugly, sacred & vulgar, meaningful & worthless.
His pieces are as scatological as they are fascinating.

One of his greatest works ‘Cloaca’, is a mechanical digestive apparatus that produces “artists’ shit”. He says that everything in modern life is pointless. The most useless object he could create was a machine that serves no purpose at all, creating shit.

The gothic-inspired Chapel features kissing skelettons, intestins and royal fingers in a divine & grotesque depiction of vanity.

And since we were playing the game of trespassing dogma and conventions, I climbed the chapel’s column, as if it were a pole.

Su-Mei Tse’s black ink fountain also left a stain in our minds. “She evokes the infinite potential of words and the eternal renewing of creation” (www.mudam.lu)