The Unloved

The Unloved

There are stories we love and stories that we don’t. The unloved are always the most interesting. Ellen Harvey Ellen Harvey’s new commission for the Groeningemuseum, ‘The Unloved’, juxtaposes Bruges’ fraught connection to the sea with an alternative view of the Museum’s collection to create a beautiful and unsettling installation that immerses viewers in an endlessly mirroring series of conflicting and complementary narratives.

Harvey’s installation spans an enfilade of five rooms in which she has replaced the temporary walls that usually conceal the Museum’s art depot with 2.7 m high by 5.2 m wide mirrors pierced with salon-style openings through which the paintings in storage can be viewed. The paintings, which are not generally exhibited, were organized thematically by Harvey, starting with views of Bruges in the first room, views of the canals linking Bruges to the sea in the next two rooms, views of the old harbor of Bruges in the fourth room and seascapes in the last room.

The installation also includes four large new paintings by Harvey, based on contemporary satellite images of Bruges and its connection to its ocean port of Zeebrugge, which was constructed in 1907 to reconnect Bruges to the ocean, replacing the old Zwin channel, whose silting up from the 15th Century onward precipitated a radical decline in Bruges’ fortunes. The paintings are identical in size to the mirrors opposite which they are hung and their progression mimics that of the exhibitions of the depot paintings, progressing from Bruges to its port. Only the last room with the installation of sea paintings is otherwise empty.

 The paintings provide a sharp contrast to the picturesque images of Bruges from the collection, showing a view of Bruges far removed from the medieval charms for which it is known. The contrast in scale between the old trading city and its vast industrial container port is striking : the connection between the two sets of canals appears symbolic as much as functional. All waterways in the paintings of the satellite view paintings are inlaid with mirrors so that as viewers walk through the installation, they see themselves and the paintings endlessly multiplied, much as the installation itself offers a multiplicity of views both of the Museum’s collection and of Bruges itself, both challenging and validating Bruges’ status as a work of art in of itself.