Work in situ

When scriptwriting his own major projects, Mark Swysen purposefully looks for a location that will intensify the visitors experience by offering the correct context for the project. Thus he shows the “Causa Vitae”-project about the meaning of life in monumental churches and cathedrals. And “Quo Vadis”, a project about cross-bordermigration is hosted by Fort Napoleon, a historical fortress garding the Belgian coastline from foreign intruders.

In addition to these large-scale projects, he likes to re-interpret existing museal collections by means of smaller interventions.

Patronised by the Museum MuFDB he enters into a dialogue between his own work and a selection he curated from the collection of one of Belgiums most renowned abstract modern painters, Felix De Boeck (1898-1995). In this project, Mark Swysen makes an explicit use of the architecture of the recently reappointed monumental Pieter & Pauwelchurch in Mol. The positioning of the works thus becomes a spacial intervention, following 2 diagonal axes.

Or he uses the context of peculiar locations (such as the old prison in the city of Hasselt) to surprise the visitor in one of the smaller prison cells by portraying an abstract human figure in the identical colours of the flaked off walls.  In the background dreams of freedom and liberation flutter gently on the monotonous rhythm of an old ventilator.

Invited by the non profit organisation ART. 27, he re-invents a class room in an elementary school in order to question the relationschip between education, money and power.

                             installation "Papillon" in Old Prison Hasselt