Complex States: Art in the Years of Brexit

Global & Digital (London, LABIOMISTA, TOKYO,...)
28 October - 31 December 2020

The events of Brexit have stirred, disturbed, and tantalised not only British society, but also its European and international counterparts. They have also contributed significantly to the urgency within discussions of citizenship,identity, nationalism, migration, and globalization. Questions remain however, on whether art and culture should or can play a role in these debates.

Complex States: Art in the Years of Brexit, is a visual arts exhibition curated by Catherine Harrington and Vassiliki Tzanakou features artists’ and cultural practitioners’ critical engagements with the events that followed before, during and after the referendum from both a national and international perspective; offering more holistic, and at times, playful narratives and practices. The exhibition also aims to further explore, represent, and discuss the complex states of artists, cultural practitioners and institutions as they worked through the events of the referendum’s outcome, whilst attempting to create an historical archive of these reflections.

Works on display are of a variety of media including video, painting, sculpture, campaign documentation and posters as well as site specific installations.

Due to COVID-19, the exhibition has changed from a one venue offline show, to an international multi-venue project including an innovative digital exhibition platform. An app enables users to install, share and store virtual artworks in their own current location; and thus also see where other users have placed artworks. This technology then also allows Complex States to be installed and viewed virtually, in multiple forms anywhere in the world. Users of our app can design and then publish their own version of the Complex States virtual exhibition in a location of their choice (their home, their garden, their university. etc) using the available virtual artworks in the Complex States exhibition. Other users can then visit the location of this virtual exhibition at any time and view the exhibition with their own AR-capable device.

Vanmechelen has been selected by the curators with his work 'Mechelse Redcap - 3rd Generation Cosmopolitan Chicken Project. The work can be visited at LABIOMISTA; a 24-hectare park, situated in Genk (BE), that is an open-air exhibition.

Koen Vanmechelen
Mechelse Redcap - CCP3

Vanmechelens Cosmopolitan Chicken Project (CCP) began twenty years ago as a disruptive artistic enquiry, with the bird used by the artist as a metaphor for humanity as it has spread and shaped itself across the globe.

With the CCP, Vanmechelen set out to disrupt the increasingly mono-cultural and restrictive processes, through crossing. The Adam and Eve of the Cosmopolitan Chicken Project were the Belgian Mechelse Koekoek and the French Poulet de Bresse, crossed on the border between Belgium and France as part of an art exhibition curated by Jan Hoet. Dozens of offspring were born from the crossing, including a black cockerel.

In the year 2000, this work of art 'was paired with the genetically impoverished and almost extinct English Redcap. Due to intense inbreeding aimed at even greater egg production and even more meat for consumption, the Redcap breed had become almost infertile. Koen Vanmechelen had to do quite a bit of research in order to find a few specimens in Northampton. He crossed the Channel and bought 14 chickens.

The chickens crossed in the Lisson Gallery in London, one of the most influential contemporary art galleries in the world. A new fertile generation hatched in the gallery: the Mechelse Redcap. For Vanmechelen this was obvious proof of the importance of diversity and of mixing, whether it is of race, identity or discipline.

Anna 2020, Koen Vanmechelens long-running Cosmopolitan Chicken Project has resulted in a domesticated chicken strain (a.k.a. living art) with unprecedented genetic diversity. Each successive generation of the CCP has proven to be more resilient, longer living, less susceptible to disease, and less aggressive than the previous one.

In 2000, The Times - predictively - sees the Mechelse Redcap as an improved version of the European Union and puts a picture of it on the cover.

Discover more on the website

Exhibition Facts

The online exhibition can be visited from every location in the world, by downloading the  AR-APP. For more information, visit the website

If you want to visit the installation at LABIOMISTA;

Tuesday – Sunday, 10h – 17h30 until Nov 8

Marcel Habetslaan 60, 3600 Genk