Project

For a More Humane World: Sculpture and Technology in Belgium, 1955-1985

Code
01P10422
Duration
01 January 2023 → 31 December 2025
Funding
Regional and community funding: Special Research Fund
Research disciplines
  • Humanities
    • Cultural history
    • Ethics of technology
    • History of art
    • Installation
    • Sculpture
Keywords
Art and Technology Postwar Art in Belgium Sculpture
 
Project description

The relation between postwar art and technology is widely considered in terms of progress, optimism, and prosperity. This project sets forth to re-examine postwar art and technology in more subtle and complex ways. Its ambition is to analyze postwar sculpture in Belgium in its unique engagement with the rise and fall of techno-optimism, showing how three successive generations of artists reflected upon technology—its values, vicissitudes, and contradictions—between 1955 and 1985. The project aims to understand how artists in Belgium used sculpture to explore different ways in which technology makes the world more modern and archaic, more enriched and impoverished, and more humane and dehumanized, all at once. Hence this project aims to shed new light on postwar art and technology, and to offer a much-needed, original contribution to the history-writing of postwar art in an undervalued region—Belgium.