Meeting Generation Y

How did this exhibition project come about?

We are eight students in the Bachelor in Visual Arts and Exhibition who organized this project. Our end-of-year project is to design an exhibition from A to Z, so this is how we designed and built the "Generation Y" exhibition. Our training at IESA arts&culture gives us a concrete approach to our future careers and a practice that confronts us with fieldwork, unlike the more theoretical university curricula that all of us went through beforehand.

This project took a while to come together because we had several ideas. All of us having very strong characters and personalities of our own, we had trouble agreeing at first. In the end we chose to create something that resembles us and brings us together, that is, to evoke our generation, dubbed "Generation Y". This very term is debated, but it is no less striking and intriguing. It is a label that, generally speaking, does not get everyone to agree, but that is also what interested us, because we precisely wanted our theme to raise questions and prompt reflection. It is, moreover, this difficulty of definition that stimulated us to approach this theme through the prism of art.

What seems certain to us is that our generation is special: an accelerated generation, hyper-creative and hyper-reactive in every field, and that is what we wanted to highlight.

What characterizes our "Y" generation today? Why do we speak of Generation Y?

Through communities such as Instagram or Facebook, our generation seems to need to come together, find each other and communicate without any border limits. That is why we chose four international photographers:

• Bahar Kaygusuz – lives and works in Berlin,
• Poppy Thorpe – lives and works in London,
• Victor Maître – lives and works in Brussels,
• Mathias Ponard – lives and works in Paris.

The chosen artists are both people we knew and recent discoveries made in relation to the theme. They, two women and two men, a gender-balanced choice reflecting our generation, had all photographed youth, as young people themselves from Generation Y. We therefore asked them to continue reflecting on this theme. Their work is similar because they belong to the same generation, but it differs through the personality and work of each photographer and their models. With this exhibition, we wish to present the affirmation of different perspectives within a single unit, Generation Y.

For the opening held on Friday, April 6, 2018, we were pleased to welcome two additional artists. A Franco-Congolese artist, Prince Roger Nienguet, who offered a performance on the exhibition’s theme. He questions categories and genres, "what is or is not in its place", inviting us to make the link between an idea, a form and a situation.

We also had the honor of screening the documentary film by a Russian artist, Olga Darfy, "Me, Gagarin", which recounts her own experience of being 20 at the time of the collapse of the Soviet Union. She evokes a youth full of intense emotions and extreme excitement, to the beat of DJs at rave parties.