Babel: a biblical story reclaimed

Where better than Brussels to put on an exhibition about the Tower of Babel? All those languages! All that confusion! And at Botanique as well, in the shadow of the Finance Tower. Perfect!

But I’m getting carried away with the old version of the Babel story as it appears in the Book of Genesis. This goes as follows: After the Flood, the survivors decided to build a city with a tower high enough to reach the heavens. They spoke a single language and worked effectively together, so God punished their presumption by mixing up their languages and scattering them across the face of the Earth.

But interpretations change, and Babel has been reclaimed by people keen to promote multilingualism and crosscultural understanding. The trophy for the European Parliament’s Lux cinema prize, for example, is a Tower of Babel fashioned from film stock. And at a cultural summit last year, European commissioner Androulla Vassiliou proclaimed that “the Tower of Babel is still standing, tall and proud”. So far she has not been scattered across the face of the Earth.

Old and new versions of Babel sit side by side in the Botanique exhibition, originally put together for the Lille Museum of Fine Arts. It features 38 artists from around the world, most represented by work produced in the last decade.

Typical of the old school is Du Zhenjun of China, who uses photomontage to create massive towers from fragments of skyscraper, cathedral and other monumental buildings, filling the foreground with images of natural disaster and civil unrest (above left).

The new Babel school is led by German artist Jakob Gautel, whose tower is constructed from 15,000 books spiralling up in the centre of the gallery, a weight of words that shows no sign of falling down.

The spiral form of tower that appears throughout the exhibition is a reference to Pieter Bruegel the Elder. His two surviving paintings of the Tower both feature colonnades modelled on the Colosseum, winding up unsteadily to a summit still under construction.

New York-based Vik Muniz plays directly with Bruegel, photographing a jigsaw based on one of his Babel paintings, while British artist John Isaacs merges Bruegel’s tower with a termite mound in the sculpture “Architecture of Aspiration”.

Closer to home, Belgian photographer Eric de Ville has made a series of towers by photomontaging typical Brussels facades into the shape of Bruegel’s original.

Other works in the show are less closely connected to the Babel story but extend the idea of creating buildings or cityscapes from other architectural elements. Jean-François Rauzier, for example, multiplies parts of the palace of Versailles or Montjuic cemetery into infinite cities, while Yang Yongliang uses tower blocks to build facsimiles of the jagged mountain landscapes of southern China. His minutely animated video loops are mesmerising.

But eeriest of all is Hilary Berseth’s “Programmed Hive 9” (above right), in which bees  have been persuaded to build their honeycomb in the shape of a dome. There is no direct reference to Babel, but it contributes perfectly to the exhibition’s meditation on structure, collaboration and abandonment.

Babel, Botanique, 236 Rue Royale, 1210 Brussels; www.botanique.be; until April 21

This article first appeared in Flanders Today