Recently the S.M.A.K. contemporary museum of art in Ghent (BE) has opened TRACK, an exhibition which is spread out over the whole city appropriating public and semi-public spaces in different parts of the city. The exhibition is curated by Philippe Van Cauteren (artistic director of S.M.A.K.) and Mirjam Varadinis (curator of the Kunsthaus in Zurich). This week we will highlight one of the exhibited artworks every day, starting with Ahmet Öğüt’s Castle of Vooruit (2012) pictured above.

TRACK is meant to form a triptych with Chambres d’Amis (1986) and Over The Edges (2000). Its foremost objective is to start a dialogue between the city, its inhabitants and the artists. TRACK features work by 41 different artists, all commissioned specifically for the exhibition with a total budget of 3,6 million euro. Some art works will remain after the exhibition is over, some will be removed.

The work of the Turkish artist Ahmet Öğüt carries, like many other artworks at TRACK, a specific relation to city of Ghent. Öğüt often works around the theme of history, often trying to locate a hiatus and reconstructing a new version of this history. For TRACK he created ‘The Castle of Vooruit’, obviously a reference to Magritte’s floating rock or ‘The Castle in the Pyrenees’ (1959) pictured below. Instead of a castle, Öğüt’s version actually carries the iconic Vooruit building of Ghent, thereby referring to Ghent’s socialistic history.