The work of Jos de Gruyter and Harald Thys confronts us with the fact that we are no longer able to understand the world we inhabit. For the past twenty years, the two Belgian artists have collaborated in video work, performance and mime plays populated by a cast of non-professional actors whom they condemn to enacting eventless stagings in gloomy and bleak interiors. Together with their artists' books, installations and drawings, these works tour a weird, troublingly dark universe, inhabited by a variety of peculiar objects, stone-faced women and wig-wearing men - an idiosyncratic and misanthropic theatre of the absurd characterised by a ghoulish and sometimes sinister humour: a sort of noir surrealism, perhaps typically 'Belgian'.¹

Their video Die Fregatte (The Frigate, 2008), first shown at the 5th Berlin Biennial in 2008, is a 20-minute, speechless depiction of a world almost completely lacking in movement. The cast is made of several characters and objects (in order of appearance): a peeping Tom videotaping from behind a bush, a young man, a candelabrum, a woman, three other men, a black couch, a brick wall, a man with a fake red beard and a black frigate model on a pedestal. They all interact, humans and objects alike, accompanied by a soundtrack of abrupt, dramatic organ music. The camera lingers on details of the frigate - sails, ropes, cannons - and registers from a fixed position the men, who observe the frigate and the woman, and who then circle them both, even touching the woman, who appears sitting on the couch in different poses. The peeping Tom tapes this, looking into the viewfinder with one eye, and at us with