Like a pictorial encyclopedia, Das Wunder des Lebens contains over four hundred drawings that show all that the modern world has to offer, from maps and city views to cars and airplanes. However, unlike conventional pictorial dictionaries, there is no symbolic system.

Copublished with Kunsthalle Wien and Kunsthalle Basel on the occasion of the eponymous exhibition at the former, 7 February–4 May, 2014, and Projekt 13 at the latter, 16 January–14 March, 2010.

Designed by Antoine Begon and Boy Vereecken.

Mondo Cane presents itself as a local folkloric museum that displays the human figure. Silent, pale and frightened, the pavilion’s inhabitants appear as aestheticized shells, stuck in a loop of formal activity that the visitor perceives as odd and out of touch with contemporary reality.

Jos de Gruyter and Harald Thys have the habit of distilling fictions out of a reality that is, sometimes, ‘too real.’ Both willingly concede that they feel attracted to the psychotic state of contemporary societies, a state that they simultaneously dread and disseminate in their work.

Designed by Boy Vereecken and Antoine Begon.