Billboard Series is a long-term art project in public space, for which every three months an artist is invited to create a new, site-specific work for a 50 m2 billboard on Dok Noord, Ghent. Through changing presentations, Billboard Series wants to build a sustainable and productive dialogue with the surrounding neighbourhood and urban landscape, reflect on the changes that this neighbourhood is currently undergoing, and introduce a broad audience to different visual languages and ways of looking at the world.
Aline Bouvy started working from the concept of the car, omnipresent around the Billboard because of the proximate city ring and the surrounding parking space. She revisited the relation between men and their cars. She created an image which is absurd – even clownish: two white males lie on top of obviously fake, toy-like cars, in a position better fit for a toddler than for a grown man. The men are curled up like fetuses, wearing pants nor shoes. Scattered around the cars are pieces of bread, shaped like bones and ribcages.
This absurd advertisement seeks a place for itself into the evolution of the imagery of caradvertisements. These have shifted from an over-sexualized approach to a more environmental awareness. Performativity however – or a focus on how owning a specific car can shape our identity – has always remained at its core. It’s this insistence on performativity that Bouvy wants to question, and oppose to the growing deficit in human performance – or how we seem to lose our ability to truly connect to one another. This feeling of loss is also echoed in the bread – an important symbol of our evolution as a species, in which the cultivation of wheat to make bread was an important step. It’s like we still remember how to make dough, but have forgotten what bread is supposed to look like.
The edition Aline Bouvy made in relation to this billboard is a bas-relief in Jesmonite, fiber glass and natural wax, depicting a crudely made nude male figure draped across a car with a speech bubble repeating the words she hand-painted on the billboard “kaka, pipi, geld” (“piss, shit, money”).
