“Some of it Falls from the Belt and Lands on the Walkway Beside the Conveyor Belt” at Vleeshal

With this exhibition, the Madrid-based curatorial duo YABY parlay Middleburg’s Vleeshal right into a lens by means of which to deal with the byproducts of business in what was as soon as a serious port for the Dutch East India Firm.

Claudia Pagès’s Strolling the Gerund Mountain (Montjuïc, bando del Port), 2022, is a sculptural video set up consisting of a single picture fragmented throughout screens mounted on a round armature. The motion takes place on the sacred hill of Montjuïc, utilized by Spanish forces in 1842 to bomb Barcelona and later as an execution web site for anarchists and Republican troopers. Now the hill overlooks the economic port whose operations maintain the state’s financial system. In fragment from skinning cattle by energy 1867 (fig. 122 in Gideon), 2022, Aria Dean interprets the mechanized quantification of our bodies by repurposing the slaughterhouse instruments that streamline the killing of cattle. Christopher Aque’s Double Negativity (Swapping Spit), 2021, follows with a minimal illustration of circulation and trade, whereas Rindon Johnson’s five-channel audio piece Idiom 1 Plea Piece (Time is a Dimension), 2022, mashes collectively excerpts of songs that comprise the phrase “please,” underlining the final ineffectiveness of entreaty, notably in a sustained context of state violence.

With a number of references to the nineteenth century, this exhibition factors again to the Vleeshal’s personal former perform as a meat market adjoining to the headquarters of slave commerce firms. The up to date works reveal the astounding proximity of that point to our personal.

— Àngels Miralda