Last chance to join the revolution at intriguing 1960s exhibition

For anyone over a certain age, mention of the late 1960s brings certain emblematic images straight to mind: the cover of the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, Martin Luther King’s last speech, Jimi Hendrix’s dazzling riffs at Woodstock or a cobblestone flying through the air in the streets of Paris. It is these snapshots of a pivotal era – and plenty of others – that will guide visitors through Revolutions – Records and Rebels 1966-1970, the latest exhibition at the ING Art Centre in Brussels.

Revolutions was created by the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, which also produced the exhibitions Bowie Is and Pink Floyd: Their Mortal Remains. Conceived as an immersive journey, it revisits the ideals, the aspirations, the utopic visions and the thirst for freedom of the Golden Sixties, an era whose cultural, social, artistic and technological revolutions influenced our current way of life and still affect the way we envisage the future.

Bathed in the sounds of the most resonant tracks by The Beach Boys, The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, The Who, Jimi Hendrix and other stars of that era – played on headphones – visitors will be carried through the streets of Swinging London, the May 68 protests in Paris and the heart of the Summer of Love in San Francisco. In this immersive musical environment, they will discover more than 250 objects that symbolise the times, encompassing fashion, design, graphics, photography and art, combined with 3D scenography and videos.

“It’s a very different exhibition from our previous ones, because it doesn’t focus on visual art but on an era, with a variety of themes,” says Anne Petre, ING art advisor. It explores six distinct revolutions: the revolution in how we look, how we think, how we change society, how we buy, how we live and how we learn.

The exhibition has been adapted and enhanced for the ING Art Center, and includes specifically Belgian topics such as the student demonstrations in Leuven and the Amougies festival, regarded as the first European Woodstock – where you might bump into big names such as Pink Floyd, Yes and Frank Zappa.

The exhibition is open until 21.00 on Wednesdays, and on the first Wednesday of the month there’s free entry for anyone dressed in Sixties period costume. It runs until 10 March.

This article first appeared in ING Expat Time