At Macs, an exhibition on the “ghosts” of Forest prison

Since he burned all his paintings twenty years ago, and especially for ten years, he has created an art whose process is as important, if not more, than the object. “The basis of my work processhe said, is archaeological. When I talk about my work, I use the word ‘digging,’ because I work, in a way, like an amateur miner: locating materials, sorting those materials, extracting those materials.” He connects this idea to his personal history and, his interest in metals, to that of his father who was a scrap dealer.

When he is invited somewhere, he immerses himself in a nearby recently abandoned place (a hospital in Ukraine, pharmaceutical labs in Switzerland, a former psychiatric hospital, etc.) to extract objects which, for him, keep the trace, the soul, even the beauty, of all the people who were there.

For Macs, he spent a long time in Forest Prison shortly after it was emptied. In this large building built in 1910 by Edouard Ducpétiaux and now closed since the inmates were transferred in November 2022 to Haren prison, everything has remained almost as before, in degrading dilapidation. At the start of the exhibition we find the old plan of the prison and some photos and documents giving the context.

Walk along the Lys with painting in all its forms (with Daniel Turner)

Melt the radiators

Wandering around the deserted prison, Daniel Turner took thousands of black and white photos and took with him objects and rubbish (tables, mattresses, radiators, lamps, clocks, etc.). Then, either, he exhibits them as such in two rooms of the Macs, like ready-made by Marcel Duchamp, also forming still lifes: a pile of latches from the inmates’ doors, pieces of household squeegees, stacked blankets or mattresses, or large colored jugs reminiscent with a little imagination, if we concentrate the gaze , the detail of a painting by Chardin or Morandi.

Either, he transforms these objects like an alchemist changing lead into art: a jug of oil was extracted from the inmates’ tables, a pile of around fifty heavy radiators (heat in the coldness of prisons) were poured into a foundry in the north of France to become two large metal beams blocking the otherwise empty long room of Macs, like Donald Judd.

Or again, Daniel Turner grinds the metal, like the painters of old who ground their colors, to make a painting in brass flakes which he projects onto a wall in a black cloud.

At Macs, Ariane Loze or the pleasure of crossing points of view

Like Joseph Beuys who, like a shaman, sought the energy of wax and felt, he precipitates the past of the place in his manipulations. Responding to Denis Gielen, on his quasi report “spiritual, animist” to the objects in which he seems to find the soul of the people who used them, he replied: “I think that actions produced in the past permeate the materials. I think it makes sense to imagine that actions or conversations that take place somewhere survive in the materials that witnessed them. I feel the materials that would have something to say if they could speak.”

In the last room which gives its name to the exhibition, the installation “Compressor” (the compressed prison) is made of four huge screens projecting in turn 1200 images of the prison each time shown 1 second before 1 second of black, to the rhythm of the obsessive clock of the psychiatric wing of the prison, like the beating of a heart.

A minimal art exhibition but with the haunting ghost and the emotion of an empty prison and the memory that things have kept of it. Like this video which symbolizes the absurdity of a prison: he filmed a close-up of a sewing machine used by the prisoners but which here never stops and produces nothing.

Daniel Turner, Macs, Grand Hornu, until April 6