On Saturday 18 May, we kick off our 20th anniversary with Vu'Cumprá (2016), an artistic and urban intervention by Younes Baba-Ali. Performed by Eric Androa Mindre Kolo, the powerful performance takes you through Kunsthal Extra City, Antwerp's shopping streets and other public places in the city.

In this performative work, Younes Baba-Ali explores how circulation, exchange and exhibition create artistic value while juxtaposing two seemingly opposing markets: the art market and the street market. The performance humorously blends their different social customs and settings by having an inflatable toy salesman wander through artistic contexts or public space. Caught in an endless survival game between continents, the state and its economy, street vendors have become an integral part of our metropolitan landscapes.

“Vu’cumprà”, “you buy?” in a Neapolitan dialect spoken by migrants from Africa and South Asia, is the pejorative term used to refer to the peddlers of Naples. In an attempt to bring these ephemeral figures back into focus, this performance - at once hyper-realistic and absurd - creates a poignant parallel between the street seller and art market.

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PRACTICAL INFORMATION

↳ Saturday 18 May from 12:00 to 18:00 pm

↳ Ongoing performance with some breaks

↳ Through Kunsthal Extra City and public spaces in the city of Antwerp

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Younes Baba-Ali makes art that is unconventional, intelligent and critical, mostly in public space or places uncommon to his art practice. His work often assumes the form of the readymade, but underneath its facade of simplicity there is a complex exercise in balance at work. As an artist-alchemist he measures and mixes technology, objects, sound, video and photography with political, social and ecological issues. The resulting installations and at times disruptive intervention art confronts the viewer in an ironic way with himself and his environment. Baba-Ali presents people dilemmas and taboos and challenges them to (re)act. In this way he makes them his accomplices in acts of artistic guerrilla that unite the establishment and the common man.

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