Denicolai & Provoost

The Italian-Belgian duo, formed by Simona Denicolai & Ivo Provoost, are multidisciplinary artists who work with – but not exclusively – animation, objects, installations, performance, video, and publishing. They seek to offer collaborative and procedural approaches, sometimes over the long term, sometimes as a one-off performance, that involve complicity and collaboration with people who are not from the world of art but who are an integral part of the worlds that surround us. They often borrow the elements that are present in a context to combine them, separate them or assemble them together, and to create a language. They work more like intermediaries between the various components of a context to make them interact with each other through their own forms. It is this role of intermediary (or ‘director of the real’) that interests them the most: What is the artist’s role in the city?

The project EYELINER that Denicolai & Provoost have conceived for the BelgianArtPrize, focuses on objects that are displayed in the windows of small merchants and on window ledges, and thus also focuses on the people that put them there. These objects offer a more profound glimpse behind the scenes of the city. They are taking up the role of a director who creates scenarios with the available material. The artists exhibit objects that they have found lying around in the public space and through them expose the nervous system of an urban environment, for these things also lie around in the collective consciousness. Every individual object therefore fits into a wider discourse that is intertwined with the history and individuality of a place. The exhibition, that was already there in the city, can be visited after May 28, 2017 using a guidebook presenting the objects and their owners, complete with their addresses and biographies.

For their installation in the BelgianArtPrize 2017, the artists received the generous support of  :