Wild Project Gallery, 2015–2022: the record

Wild Project Gallery was a contemporary art gallery with a strong photography emphasis, at 22, rue Louvigny in the historic centre of Luxembourg City. It opened in October 2015 and mounted eleven exhibitions in its own rooms across the twenty-two months to July 2017, plus three documented fair outings — fourteen entries in this catalogue, WPG.01 to WPG.14. Then the programme stopped. Nothing was catalogued after July 2017; the website froze into a roster page that outlived the programme by five years; and by the end of 2022 the address served nothing at all. This page is the institutional history, end to end, from the Paris gallery that preceded it to the web address that outlived it.

It is also, deliberately, a landing place. Both websites that stood at this address are gone, and with them every link the photography press filed in 2015, 2016 and 2017 — artist pages, slideshow frames, exhibition notices. A reader arriving from one of those broken addresses has not reached the gallery, but the file kept about it.

Institution

Wild Project Gallery, Luxembourg City — a former business, recorded by the EMOP Luxembourg venue register as out of business in 2018

Address

22, rue Louvigny, L-1946 Luxembourg

Opened

October 2015, with In Memoriam – Wild Project Gallery, Luxembourg (2 Oct – 21 Nov 2015)

Predecessor

acte2galerie, Paris, founded 1999, dedicated to photography

Documented programme

October 2015 – July 2017; eleven exhibitions and three fair outings

Records

WPG.01–WPG.14 in the chronology

Artists indexed

Eleven, in the artist index

Website

Two eras: the 2015 page-builder site, replaced by a Wix site between November 2016 and February 2017; last archived capture serving content, 6 Nov 2022

Before Luxembourg: Paris, 1999

The gallery did not begin in Luxembourg, and it did not begin in 2015. Its founder spent more than ten years in the service of the Yoshii Foundation in Japan, rising, as he told the Luxembourg business title Paperjam on 17 November 2015, from intern to assistant to the foundation's president. That work was with modern art and collections of it; the wish that followed was to work with living artists. In 1999 he opened acte2galerie in Paris, at 41 rue d'Artois in the 8th arrondissement, and gave it over to photography.

The programme there was explicitly a programme of masters. The gallery's own later account put the lineage in one line: it set out to exhibit the images of those who had traced the path, from Helmut Newton to David LaChapelle by way of Peter Lindbergh and Albert Watson. Paperjam widens the list to Jock Sturges, Mark Seliger, Eikoh Hosoe, John Stewart and Ellen von Unwerth, and records the harder fact underneath it: the work of those years was as much about persuading collectors that photographs were worth collecting at all, in a market that barely existed. Over time the Paris gallery opened to a younger generation. Its record is thin online now: the venue directory Paris-Art carries it as a closed location with exhibitions documented as late as 2012, and the best-documented show of its later years is Albert Watson's Exposed, thirty nude portraits shown from 15 September to 26 November 2011. What the discipline taught is legible in what came after: photography as an object with an edition, a print, a frame and a price.

The decision to move was about rooms as much as markets. A photography gallery, the founder observed, cannot easily show anything else; a new project could. Brussels was considered and set aside. Luxembourg was chosen for its position in Europe, its cultural energy, and — a candid reason, stated at the time — the small number of galleries already there.

October 2015: 22, rue Louvigny

The gallery opened with a solo exhibition by a Paris-based French artist: In Memoriam – Wild Project Gallery, Luxembourg (2 Oct – 21 Nov 2015), catalogued here as WPG.01. Sabine Pigalle, born 1963 and exhibiting internationally since 2002, showed a new series running the border between painting and photography: hybrid images, mostly portraits, drawing their primary material from Flemish masters of the golden age and the humanists and mannerists of the Renaissance. It was an unusually literate way to open a gallery, and it set the register for what followed. The show, and the Helmut Newton years behind Pigalle's lighting, are treated in Before In Memoriam.

The published plan was specific. Five exhibitions a year: three solos by artists of the gallery, and two of deliberately odd shape — one built around a guest curator presenting artists from a country little known locally, Kazakhstan named as the first; one built around a collector, setting works from a private collection against recent work by others. The stated aim was to give collectors a central place, on the argument that they are the parties who sustain artists day to day. The gallery traded under the line "art & more" and meant to show video, installation and painting as well as photographs, though the catalogue that follows is dominated by photography.

The opening was noticed. L'Œil de la Photographie announced the new gallery and its inaugural Pigalle series; International Photography Magazine carried the exhibition on 5 November 2015 with the gallery's programme statement; Paperjam profiled the project on 17 November. The opening hours the gallery published then were Wednesday to Friday, 14:30–18:30, and Saturday, 10:30–12:30 and 14:00–17:00, otherwise by appointment. The same hours were still on the site when the site went dark seven years later.

The catalogue, 2015–2017

The autumn of 2015 was busy. While WPG.01 hung on rue Louvigny, the gallery took a stand at WPG.02, Luxembourg Art Week, first edition – Luxembourg (Nov 2015), and used it to show six artists at once: Leila Alaoui, Izumi Miyazaki, Sabine Pigalle, Jeanne Susplugas, Philippe Perrin and Nøne Futbolclub. Two names in that list matter later. Alaoui's curriculum vitae, as the gallery reproduced it, records the fair under her 2015 exhibitions — ten weeks before she was shot in Ouagadougou on 15 January 2016, dying of her injuries on 18 January. And Miyazaki was on the gallery's fair wall that November, months before the solo show that made the gallery's name.

The 2016 programme opened with Disorder – Wild Project Gallery, Luxembourg (21 Jan – 5 Mar 2016), record WPG.03: Jeanne Susplugas's long enquiry into medication, domestic confinement and the distortions of contemporary life. Her career since — the most institutionally active on this roster — is traced in From Disorder to I Will Sleep When I'm Dead. Next came Muses – Wild Project Gallery, Luxembourg (17 Mar – 23 Apr 2016), record WPG.04, by Emmanuelle Bousquet, made in a 1796 building that had been a convent and then a brothel; the run is the one the gallery's own exhibitions and news pages published. Her published documentation is almost entirely French-language; the Journal's profile assembles it in English. At the end of March the gallery was in Paris for WPG.05, Art Paris – Grand Palais, Paris (Mar 2016). Back in Luxembourg, Did You Know Kazakhstan? – Wild Project Gallery, Luxembourg (28 Apr – 11 Jun 2016), record WPG.06, delivered the promised country slot: a group exhibition mounted with IADA, listing ten Kazakh artists — among them Askhat Akhmediyarov, Said Atabekov, Almagul Menlibayeva and Alexander Ugay — and dated by the gallery 28 April to 11 June 2016.

Then the summer show that outlived the gallery. Cute and Cruel – Wild Project Gallery, Luxembourg (30 Jun – 30 Jul 2016), record WPG.07, gave Izumi Miyazaki her first solo exhibition anywhere, the summer she left Musashino Art University in Tokyo, and drew more international coverage than any other exhibition in the programme. The show is documented at Cute & Cruel, the pictures argued in The girl who photographs her own disappearance, and the years since kept open at Where is Izumi Miyazaki?. Autumn brought Jardin Secret – Wild Project Gallery, Luxembourg (16 Sep – 29 Oct 2016), record WPG.09, showing Vee Speers's Botanica in Luxembourg for the first time; the exhibition history follows that thread into The Birthday Party. The year closed with two shows that moved the gallery off photography: Journal intime – Wild Project Gallery, Luxembourg (from 11 Nov 2016), record WPG.08, by the Luxembourgish painter Arny Schmit, and Ultraliberal – Wild Project Gallery, Luxembourg (from 15 Dec 2016), record WPG.10, in which the Belgian conceptualist Pascal Bernier proposed an archaeology of the future, looking back on an early twenty-first century governed by exhausted capital and the tyranny of the measurable.

The final season was the densest. Nocturnes – Wild Project Gallery, Luxembourg (9 Feb – 18 Mar 2017), record WPG.11, showed Alvin Booth's large photographs and sculptures of the night. One week after it closed, Dark Celebration – Wild Project Gallery, Luxembourg (25 Mar – 13 May 2017), record WPG.12, opened as the gallery's entry in the European Month of Photography, with Cédric Delsaux's then-unseen Underground Society; the full account is at Dark Celebration. While that show hung, the gallery was at the Grand Palais again — WPG.13, Art Paris, stand E17 – Grand Palais, Paris (Mar 2017). On 1 June 2017 it opened its last catalogued exhibition, The Body Behind the Body – Wild Project Gallery, Luxembourg (1 Jun – 22 Jul 2017), record WPG.14, in which Angelo Musco built monumental images from thousands of photographed bodies. One announced format never appears at all: no collector-curated exhibition is documented in the twenty-two months the gallery was open.

A note on dates

Small discrepancies run through the sources, and an archive that hides them is worth less than one that lists them. Three sources carry dates: the 2015–2017 site's exhibitions page, the Wix entries that replaced it, and the photography-now.com directory. For the inaugural show, L'Œil de la Photographie, International Photography Magazine and photography-now.com all give 2 October – 14 November 2015, while the gallery's own exhibitions page and the 17 November 2015 Paperjam profile close it on 21 November; the catalogue follows the gallery. For Nocturnes the gallery announced a vernissage on Thursday 9 February 2017 and a run of 9 February to 18 March; photography-now.com prints 10 February to 18 March.

A one-day gap of a different kind affects three records. The Wix entries that replaced the original site date Muses, Cute and Cruel and Jardin Secret to 16 March, 29 June and 15 September 2016 — in each case one day before the run the gallery published while the work was on the wall. The earlier site's exhibitions page gives Muses as 17 March to 23 April 2016 from the capture of 30 March 2016 onward, and Cute and Cruel as 30 June to 30 July 2016 in the capture of 30 October 2016; its news page gives the same two runs, the second with a vernissage on Thursday 30 June, and announces Jardin Secret as 16 September to 29 October 2016 with a vernissage on the Friday evening of 16 September. L'Œil de la Photographie, It's Nice That, Booooooom and the photography-now.com directory agree with the gallery on the two summer and autumn shows; a Luxembourg listings entry gives Muses as 18 March to 23 April. This catalogue was first compiled from the later Wix entries; checking them against the gallery's own archived pages showed the three to be database entry dates set one day early, so WPG.04, WPG.07 and WPG.09 print the dates the gallery itself published. Both readings stay on this page, and the reconciliation is set out in the corrections log. The widest variance concerns the last show, announced by the gallery as 1 June to 22 July 2017 and carried by photography-now.com as 2 June to 23 September 2017. Nothing located here confirms the September date.

Off rue Louvigny: the fairs

Three fair appearances are documented, and all three are catalogued here as records in their own right.

The first edition of Luxembourg Art Week ran 3–8 November 2015 at the Halle Victor Hugo in Luxembourg-Limpertsberg and drew more than 7,000 visitors. Contemporary reporting counted eighteen or nineteen participating galleries — Ceysson, Clairefontaine, Magda Danysz, Baudoin Lebon, Lelong, Nosbaum Reding, Schortgen, Toxic and Zidoun–Bossuyt among them — with Wild Project Gallery on the list a month after opening its doors. The wider Luxembourg picture is assembled in Photography in Luxembourg: a field guide in English.

Art Paris Art Fair 2016 ran 31 March – 3 April 2016 under the glass of the Grand Palais, with some 143 galleries from twenty-two countries and South Korea as guest of honour; the gallery's presentation brought together Vee Speers, Izumi Miyazaki, Jeanne Susplugas, Nøne Futbolclub and Sabine Pigalle. The 2017 edition ran 30 March – 2 April 2017, and the gallery took stand E17 with new work by Sabine Pigalle, Jeanne Susplugas, Izumi Miyazaki, Arny Schmit and Pascal Bernier. The stand also carried an homage to Leila Alaoui, fourteen months after her death — the gesture that fixes her, in this catalogue, as a subject of the record rather than a name on a roster.

A fourth outing was not a fair but a festival, and required no travel. The European Month of Photography Luxembourg, the biennial organised by Café-Crème asbl, listed Dark Celebration in its 2017 programme; because the festival falls in odd-numbered springs, 2017 was the only edition to land inside the gallery's documented life. The festival's venue register still carries the gallery's entry, and that entry supplies the most consequential line in this file.

The programme stops

After WPG.14 closed on 22 July 2017, nothing further was catalogued: no autumn show, no 2018 season, no closing announcement, no farewell notice on the website. The record simply ends, mid-sentence, at the height of an active year — three exhibitions, a Paris fair and a festival entry inside seven months.

One institutional source dates the end. The EMOP Luxembourg venue register, which lists the gallery at its rue Louvigny address, annotates the entry with the flat statement that it went out of business in 2018. No contemporaneous news report of a closure has been located, and no liquidation notice; the festival's register is the clearest institutional statement found, and it is recorded here as such.

A second break in the evidence is technical, and it came earlier than the silence rather than with it. Between the last archived capture of the original page-builder site, on 30 October 2016, and the first capture of its Wix replacement, on 28 February 2017, the gallery changed platforms, and the old address structure stopped resolving — the /1/ pages holding the artist entries, the exhibition notices and the Cute and Cruel slideshow frames. Every deep link the photography press had filed since 2015 broke at that point, in the middle of an active programme and nearly six years before the site itself went dark.

The frozen years, 2017–2022

What remained online was a roster. The Wix site listed ten artists — Leila Alaoui, kept in memoriam, Pascal Bernier, Alvin Booth, Cédric Delsaux, Izumi Miyazaki, Angelo Musco, Sabine Pigalle, Arny Schmit, Vee Speers and Jeanne Susplugas — with Emmanuelle Bousquet, shown in 2016, absent from the final list. Its exhibitions page carried the whole Luxembourg programme, from In Memoriam to Angelo Musco, most recent entry 31 May 2017. Its news feed carried one item later: a post dated 1 January 2020 announcing an online shop, on the stated grounds that more and more people were asking for one.

Everything else stayed exactly as it was. Archived captures from at least August 2020 through November 2022 show an identical front page carrying an identical notice: the gallery was closed for the summer holidays and would reopen on 6 September. For more than two years, across three Septembers, a dead business told its visitors it would be back after the break, above an unchanged list of opening hours — the most eloquent document in this file, and the least intentional. What that state of affairs means for artists, works and the paper trail is the subject of When a gallery closes.

The disappearance

The last archived capture in which the gallery's site was served is dated 6 November 2022. The next crawl in the index, on 6 December 2022, returned a 404; through 2023, 2024 and 2025 the captures alternate between 404 responses and none at all. The web address that had carried the gallery's name since 2015 stopped answering, and the site it had served exists now only in the archive.

The loss was not total, but it was severe. The 2015–2017 site — the one with the checklists, the artist texts and the exhibition dates this catalogue relies on — survives only as Internet Archive captures, several of them partial, and the Wix roster survives the same way. Everything else a gallery accumulates in twenty-two months — price lists, consignment notes, visitor numbers — was never public and is not recoverable here.

Why the file stays open

Three interlocking indexes hold the subject: the exhibition chronology, fourteen dated records; the artist index, eleven dossiers; and the Journal. The gallery is a closed subject. The artists are not, and their dossiers carry the record forward as it accumulates.

The gaps are stated rather than filled. This file cannot say why the programme stopped in the summer of 2017, only when. It cannot document the collector-curated exhibition the gallery announced, no evidence having been found that it happened. It cannot give closing dates for Journal intime or Ultraliberal, because the gallery published opening dates for both and never a closing one. It cannot say what became of the works on the walls in July 2017. Where the public record is silent, the entries say so.

Corrections and additions are the point of an archive that admits its holes. Documentation that would date an entry more precisely, resolve one of the variances above, or extend an artist's record is welcomed through the contact form; the corrections log is the dated record of changes to the file, and About describes the publication. A small gallery in a small city ran for less than two years, went quiet, and then went missing from the web entirely. That is a common enough story that nobody usually writes it down. Here it is written down.