The Untitled exhibition project began during the Coronavirus period, through enthusiastic virtual conversations between Lyon and Liège and between BHN and the Trinkhall, about survival and collaboration. What are we being deprived of? Places where we are no longer allowed to go? But the lockdown to which we have been so cruelly reduced encourages us to rethink the original concept of boundaries, which evokes both limitations and freedom. The verb “to exist” indicates the act of projecting yourself outside your being, out of the place where you are simply standing. Existence is a spatial experience. It implies being anchored down, but also flying away: the movement of an arrow and its indeterminate target! What we call “art” is no different to this. We see the workshop as a privileged laboratory, the place of shared experience where, slowly and silently, the flights, fireflies and dragonflies of our dreams are created. The workshop is the place we have chosen that allows us to reflect on and feel the artistic condition even beyond its walls. Workshops across the world transform the vulnerability they accommodate into power.

The Trinkhall houses over three thousand pieces all created by vulnerable people in a workshop context. The works come from all over the world and have been patiently collected over the last forty years. We watch over them like a lighthouse illuminating our existential worries and hopes. Our collection has now been expanded by the work of five artists from the Walloon region Créahm (Creativity and learning disability) all selected by the Trinkhall. Five very key artists in the Créahm’s history: Together and individually, for over thirty years, they have conveyed the expressive power of fragile worlds. Anny Servais, Patrick Hanocq, Pascal Tassini, Alain Meert and Michel Petiniot, like most of the workshop creators, do not assign titles to their work. Are they indifferent to what they may become? Is it because they themselves have no title or conventional standards, as if they are unimpeded by the need to please or by the burden of being themselves? Is being like this, working hour after hour, day after day, year after year, their heart’s beating from the act of existing, why they speak of both freedom and asceticism? Under the headline Untitled, the Trinkhall is heading for Lyon!

(The Untitled exhibition will also be shown at the Trinkhall Museum in spring, 2022)