The ONBOARDS Biennale 2025 is open in Antwerp until July 28th. I am happy to be one of the invited artists and present my work A Split Second.
The artwork was created with valuable assistance from Museum Plantin-Moretus
(Print Room collection), Antwerp – UNESCO World Heritage
ONBOARDS offers a unique exhibition platform by transforming 100 billboards throughout Antwerp (Belgium) into sites for public artistic engagement. Through this accessible and unconventional format, they aim to create a dynamic dialogue between contemporary art and the urban public, reaching diverse audiences beyond the walls of traditional institutions.
Tatu Tuominen’s A Split Second reflects on the construction and preservation of cultural memory. The images in the artwork are appropriated from a series of drawings attributed to the workshop of Antwerp neoclassicist artist Andries Lens who lived from 1739 to 1822 and taught at the Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp.
A group of these drawings exists only as fragments — their lower halves lost, the upper portions preserved as though spared by an act of mercy. The result is uncanny: Why were the drawings torn? Why were only the upper parts saved?
Two of the drawings take center stage, forming a sequence. The figures — a putto and a classical god referencing antiquity — are caught in a dialogue of gestures. The artwork is a two-frame moving image, in which centuries collapse into a single, disjointed instant between the two images. Now transplanted into the present, they linger ghostlike in the cityscape of Antwerp in 2025.
The drawings are a recent acquisition to the historically significant Print Room collection of Museum Plantin-Moretus in Antwerp — a UNESCO World Heritage site that works daily to preserve and extend the afterlife of art. This artwork was created with valuable assistance from the museum.
