Top image: Nicolas Provost, Storyteller, Video still, 7′, 2010, Courtesy Tim Van Laere Gallery, Antwerp

Attributed to 15th century Flemish brothers Hubert and Jan van Eyck, the notorious 1493 polyptych altarpiece, The Adoration of the Mystic Lamb – aka The Ghent Altarpiece – has become one of the world’s most influential art works. An early Renaissance piece, the twelve-panelled work is recognised both for its artistic brilliance and its incredible life story: dismantled, stolen, and damaged many times over, the painting was stolen by Napoleon, nearly burnt by rioting Calvinists, owned by Kings and threatened by Nazis before being rescued by The Monuments Men.

For Elena Sorokina, art historian and curator at Art brussels, this painting represents much more than its aesthetic value, it poses the question: can we ever really own art at all? Considering the different facets of this idea, Sorokina took the van Eyck brothers’ iconic painting as a springboard for her latest exhibition, Mystic Properties, a special exhibition at this year’s Art Brussels 50th anniversary fair exploring the idea of ownership in art.

Using The Adoration of the Mystic Lamb as a starting point for 30 upcoming artists to respond to, pieces in the exhibition explored the reality and conversation surrounding owning property (The Mystic Lamb being a prime example of never really belonging, except to the wider community of its admirers), religion and material value. Here we talk to Sorokina about why she thinks commercial value doesn’t always equate to artistic merit.

Robyn Sian Cusworth: How did the Mystic Properties exhibition – one that challenges the ownership of art – resonate at Art Brussels, a fair that is built around just that?
Elena Sorokina: I wanted to talk about an ethical way of buying art and supporting artists, so this fair is precisely the best place to ask this question. It is places like Art Brussels where crowds who are shaping these types of habits congregate. I guess you could say my role as curator here is a kind of preaching.

RSC: So you used the Van Eyck Brothers’ masterpiece to inspire a new generation of artists.
ES: Yes, and all the artists in the show tackle this in their own style, with their own ideas. Annie Vigier & Franck Apertet (les gens d’Uterpan) really sink their teeth into questioning the idea in particular, they sell their immaterial creations as a set of instructions to ‘activate’, so you can buy the performances on paper and then once they are activated that counts as one work of art, but you can only activate the instructions as art as many times as they have specified.

RSC: Almudena Lobera’s piece was fascinating – where she wrapped up her work in brown paper and made the buyer agree not to open it.
ES: This is what I like about this work, there’s a connection between irony and seriousness. She’s playing around with concepts and almost selling an invisible object. So in this work, the buyer can only unwrap the mysterious parcel when the lost altarpiece is found.

RSC: And the parcel is exactly the same size as The Adoration of the Mystic Lamb‘s lost panel. On a curious level, it asks: what if it is the panel? We’ll never know, it’s really asking to be torn apart [laughs].
ES: [laughs] There’s a real relationship with faith and trust here and yes, the work is very tangible and provocative of a desire to touch and to un-do. There’s a sense of gambling too – art is also sadly about gambling. There’s always a risk in guessing how much something is going to be worth monetarily.

“I want to promote a good way of owning art. Being close to the artist and knowing their work – not just buying stuff to dump into a storage space in Singapore or something”

RSC: The exhibition says a lot about physicality of art and the use of new materials.
ES: Well, our point of discussion was the first ever oil painting, along with having a very physical story. Recent graduate Ola Lanko ties these ideas together really well, her Athenian figure shows circles and complexities in artwork. Her antique sculptures are transformed by computers in a kind of visual noise, then she makes a new image and then applies a jacquard weaving. In Ola’s work there’s real intellectual means, conceptual means and material means that circle one another.

RSC: Sounds like Ola is one to watch, Who else should we be keeping our eye on?
ES: That’s difficult, I love them all. I’m not a career maker and I don’t predict commercial success… That being said, Cadine Navarro who has also just graduated is very interesting. Her golden piece speaks in a very direct and contemporary language, she uses today’s matter, like seeds and plants and goes against the grain of our crazy world of Facebook spying and the emotional disturbance of young people with this never ending socialisation. If you own Cadine’s work, you would own the works of a future organism. Clément Cogitore the filmmaker is also a genius – the film in this exhibition follows a community trying to trace a lamb through forests, baroque ruins, control towers and Roman catacombs in realms combining the archaic underworld with new technologies.

RSC: You talk about the ‘fleetingness’ of exhibitions and the idea of public ownership. How do they link?
ES: Though no exhibition is ever the same, I asked the architect of the exhibition to make a space that can be reused. He created a narrative in the exhibition space itself, harking back to Pre-Renaissance paintings. Importantly, the show can travel anywhere, which feeds into the idea of showing art so that people have a communal ownership of it. That being said, an exhibition in one space is very different to the next.

Find more information on Mystic Properties here.