Tuur and Flup
Marinus

Tuur & Flup Marinus, two brothers born in °81and °85 who live in Belgium (Antwerp) and form an artistic duo.
Tuur Marinus studied visual arts at the KdG Hogeschool (Antwerp) and contemporary dance at P.A.R.T.S. (Brussels). He created the dance performance Dominos and Butterflies with the Brussels based dance collective Busy Rocks, followed by own creations Still Animals and The Workshop. The stage and installation versions of Still Animals were presented in musea, public spaces and theatres across Europe. Tuur Marinus also worked as a dancer for Vincent Dunoyer, Fabian Barba and They Are Here, and is currently a lecturer and researcher at the Dance Department of the Antwerp Conservatoire.
Flup Marinus studied Camera & Image at RITCS (Brussels) and Comic drawing at Sint Lucas (Brussels). After his studies he followed a training to become a stage technician. Flup is active as a comic drawer, set dresser, stage technician and helped creating some of Tuur's performances.
In 2009 the brothers re-encountered their childhood stamp collection of Belgiums former colonie 'Belgisch Congo Belge'. The encounter with these images that look so colourful, jolly and bright but mask such a dark era, became the starting point of a seven year long painterly project called 'Belgisch Congo Belge'. In this project the brothers reflect on the fact that their childhood vision of 'Congo' has been fully formed by the highly problematic series of pictures that figure on the stamps of Belgian Congo. During their seven years painting practise, they copied the entire stamp album, page by page and stamp by stamp into a 16pages series of oil paintings. They undertook the copyist-monk like practise as a sort of 'redemption' practise vis-à-vis Belgiums colonial past. To complete the copyistic circle the final result has been published (by Art Papers Edition, Ghent) into a catalogue that looks exactly like their original stamp book.
In 2017 Tuur & Flup were again confronted by imagery from Belgian Congo but this time in the form of old stereoscope cards. When viewed through a stereoscope viewer (a kind of mask) the photographical pictures on these cards can be seen in 3D. Tuur & Flup started dreaming about making an exhibition where the performative role of visitors would be highlighted by putting on these 'masks'.When invited by the organizations WorkspaceBrussels and S.a.L.E Docks (Venice) to create artistic interventions at the Venice Biennale 2017 the brothers started dreaming to one day also bring this project to Venice because of the famous Venetian carnival masks and the performative aspect of visiting the Biennale.
This painterly Stereoscope project started in a similar way to 'Belgisch Congo Belge' by copying colonial imagery in oil paint but has now evolved and has a more climatological theme, since a lot of the original Stereoscope cards hint at the catastrophical climate changes that have happened in the last century. This climatological theme is of course an extra motivation to show the project -which is now called 'Sensing Depth'- in Venice, given the cities precarious situation vis-à-vis climatological changes.