Where We Are

Not becoming fashionable at any point, but still showing a feeling for fashion – that's what at least two of the three artists taking over the MoMu stairwell tonight will be doing. For the Venezuelan performer, Ariah Lester, unpacking and repacking is in his blood. He fuses song, dance, film, storytelling, visual art and music into an appearance as hybrid as it is bombastic in high heels. In his dazzling act ‘Flags Parade’, the French performance artist and costume designer Darius Dolatyari-Dolatdoust indulges in what can best be regarded as a flamboyant form of camouflage. Is he disappearing on stage or is he just starting to appear? Much more subdued, then, is the musical set of the Ghent-based illustrator and musician Sarah Yu Zeebroek, in which she and the guitarist and composer Geoffrey Burton hark back to Chinese songs from her childhood. Three crossovers that take things to the limits, then. And beyond.

Sarah Yu Zeebroek (Ghent) moves swiftly through the worlds of music and illustration, theatre and the visual arts. Her illustrations appear in De Morgen, Humo, NRC and VPRO Gids. She likes to alternate live painting in front of an audience with more private work in the studio and she not only exhibits her own visual work in galleries but also produces scene images with companies like Walpurgis, Zonzo Company or 4Hoog. She also makes music with L. Jacobs and with her own band Hong Kong Dong. Her favourite instruments are the violin and the bass guitar/synth, with occasional forays on the flute. At MoMu, however, she has chosen to play the guzheng, a traditional plucked instrument from China. Together with Geoffrey Burton, she will evoke the Chinese melodies that slumber in her vivid memories in this unpublished concert.

Darius Dolatyari-Dolatdoust (French) commutes between Brussels and Marseille. His studies in fashion and graphic design, plastic arts, dance, performance and choreography fuelled his exploration of the body in motion. His work is situated on the boundary between fashion and performance and always in search of a symbiosis – how can a garment begin to live, become tangible, take the form of a story or a choreography? At MoMu, he and Grégoire Schaller will pay tribute to the metamorphosis of body and living textiles in ‘Flags Parade’ (2021). Are we seeing colourful birds or moving flags? Hybrid creatures swirl around each other, eventually merging into a cry for love.

Ariah Lester (Lester Arias Vizcuña from Venezuela) is a multidisciplinary artist working at the intersection of visual art, graphic design, electronic pop music and text theatre. He studied art and drama in Caracas and then at the School for New Dance Development in Amsterdam. With his androgynous appearance and clear countertenor, he guides his audience into a world where one reality shifts almost imperceptibly into another. For MoMu, Lester will once again meld all his qualities and inspirations into a sensual and emotionally charged universe, in which soft and hard, masculine and feminine, private and universal, strange and familiar seamlessly merge.