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With the backing of the BNP Paribas Foundation

Over the last few years, a new generation of French-speaking artists have been emerging in Belgium, reinventing performance art with uncanny self-confidence. Antoine Defoort, from Lille, is one of this group, running riot in Brussels and spreading a fine chaos. A mathematician by training, a visual artist, and a kindly, voluble and crazy inventor, he undermines notions of contemporary art in his savage debates-cum-shows. In his set-up of technological tinkering, he juxtaposes short snatches of video poetry, sounds and gestures in a disarmingly nonchalant and casual way. ‘Indigence=élégance’ is the general title for a compilation of his performances, chosen for the occasion or created on the spot, where the logic of the absurd is pushed to the extreme. Plonked in front of a video screen, with a computer, a sampler, a recorder and a guitar, he exhibits his small world and lets loose countless elusive and far-fetched ideas.