Juan Pablo Plazas: Breathing Document

Breathing Document  |  Press Release  | Installation View

October 25 – November 30, 2025

Goodbye Party: Friday, November 14, 7:30-9:30pm (RSVP)

Open Source Gallery is pleased to present Breathing Document, a project by Juan Pablo Plazas.

Juan Pablo Plazas is an artist based in Brussels, Belgium since 2012. He describes his activities as a sort of fortuitous ethnography that unveils itself through the manners of an art practice. He is constantly looking for the unexpected within the apparently obvious, the blatant certainty of the misunderstood and the wrong answers to the questions that no one ever asks. 

Breathing Document will be simultaneously a residency and an exhibition, centering around the question of needs within Open Source and its surrounding neighborhood and community. The project will begin with an abstracted transformation of space, which will allow for encounters that unveil the needs of the space.

For a typical project, Plazas will ask in advance what the needs of the art space and the surrounding community are, and he will adopt a poetic or absurdist approach to the answer to that question. His presence in the space often turns him into a character, where he simultaneously plays artist and problem-solver. At Open Source, rather than beginning with a defined need, he will begin with a question: What are the needs that only an artist can respond to?

Plazas’ residency at Open Source will begin with a transformation of the space of the gallery into something that suggests a service being offered, but without defining what that service will be. He will then occupy that space, interacting with gallery visitors and passersby. Do we need a new store? Do we need a place to sit? Do we need someone to chat with? As the exhibition comes to a close, perhaps we will know what the exhibition was. We may even write a new press release.

Juan Pablo Plazas graduated from Anthropology and Art at the Universidad de los Andes in Colombia in 2011. In 2013, he graduated from the Master’s program at LUCA School of Arts in Brussels. His work has been shown at SMAK, Gent, Belgium (2017), Mieke van Schaijk Galerie, ’s-Hertogenbosch, The Netherlands (2018), La Centrale, Brussels (2021 – 2022), CAC, Vilnius (2020) and Chauffeur Gallery in Sydney, Australia (2024). In 2021, he was a resident at the Frans Masereel Centrum. From 2021 to 2022, he was a resident at Hisk, Gent, Belgium, and in 2023 a resident at Lunga School in Seyðisfjörður, Iceland.