Ensemble

Influenced by a broader anti-institutional reflex in the 1980s, which gave rise to new conceptual practices, happenings and performances, Hugo Roelandt developed a belief that art should be a shared, participatory experience rather than the solitary appreciation of a finished product. On several occasions he created interventions in public spaces, ranging from Pavimenti (1987), which extended a pedestrian walkway vertically up the façade of the building that eventually became part of M HKA, to his Boel Project (1985), in which he hoisted passenger-filled buses up into the air at a shipyard. These and other such projects became some of his most ambitious and influential works, underscoring his vision of art as a social practice of visual and spatial thinking, deeply rooted in the here and now.