Simon Denny: The Business Insider
WIELS, Brussels
20 May – 14 August 2016

Simon Denny’s work explores power, politics and aesthetics. Examining how changes in technology alter our experience and even our understanding, his work is as multi-layered and complex as the reality in which we now find ourselves. Employing a wide range of forms – installations, videos, conferences, collections of objects or citations of news items – Denny unpicks the coded messages in corporate design and bureaucratic “doublespeak.” Recent case studies in his ongoing artistic enquiry have included Samsung, the USA’s National Security Agency and the jailed internet entrepreneur Kim Dotcom.

For his first solo presentation in Belgium, the artist combines elements from Secret Power – his project for the New Zealand Pavilion at the last Venice Biennial – with work made over the past year. It explores the culture (and cult) of secrecy that increasingly surrounds both private companies and public institutions. In the context of Brussels, where recent government measures threaten the erasure of privacy laws and where major international institutions such as the European Community and the headquarters of NATO are located (not to mention their associated lobby groups), Denny’s work is particularly pertinent.

Simon Denny (b. 1982 in Auckland, New Zealand) lives and works in Berlin. Denny represented New Zealand at the 56th Venice Biennial (2015).

Curator: Zoë Gray

OPENING: 19 MAY 2016 AT 19:00, WITH A CONVERSATION BETWEEN THE ARTIST AND THE CURATOR (19:00 SHARP)