In the exhibition Objects for People at MACS (Grand-Hornu), Haim Steinbach offers the viewer a different way of seeing the world around us. Born in 1944 in Rehovot, Israel, the artist has been working in New York for over forty years, using everyday objects as the raw material of his visual language. Removed from their domestic context, these items — shelves, dolls, packaging, paint cans, children’s toys — are transformed into expressive artistic statements. No brushes, no marble — just the language of things.
The shelf is the queen of Objects for People. While the traditional pedestal elevates an object and separates it from the viewer, Steinbach’s shelf does the opposite: it dismantles hierarchy, placing all objects on equal footing and bringing them closer to the audience. The horizontal plane becomes a space of dialogue — between objects, between object and viewer, between past and present. The shelf is not a backdrop but an active participant in the construction of meaning. Its shape, color, and material are all integral to the narrative. In this exhibition, the shelf serves as a structural axis around which perception is organized. In Objects for People, it also functions as a bridge between the personal and the public: the chosen objects, once part of private homes, are relocated into the museum space, yet they retain their identity. The shelf becomes a kind of translator — converting the language of domestic life into the language of art. Steinbach is not just exhibiting objects — he is exhibiting the act of exhibition itself, as if the museum were not a place of preservation but a space for questioning: why this object? how do we show it? what does it say to us?
As Steinbach once said:
“I’m not just showing the object – I’m showing how it’s shown. What we choose, what we display, and why.”
Since the early 1980s, Steinbach has been known for his laminated shelves of geometric shapes, most often triangular in cross-section, on which he arranges carefully selected objects. These are not random compositions — each item is embedded in a network of meanings, associations, and visual echoes. His practice borders on anthropology: through everyday things, he explores how culture enters domestic life, and how the domestic in turn becomes a cultural phenomenon.
A special part of the exhibition is a project created specifically for MACS. In it, Steinbach invited six individuals — from a teenager to a woman nearly a hundred years old — to talk about meaningful objects in their homes. There was no script, no direction, just conversation. These objects were then brought into the museum and became part of an installation accompanied by video interviews. Through a simple cup or a small figurine, entire inner worlds are revealed — personal, touching, and profoundly human.
Other key works in the exhibition — the projects created with Belgian collectors An Offering: Collectibles of Jan Hoet (1992) and An Offering: Collectibles of Herman Daled (2000) — continue this theme: collecting as a gesture, a way to assign meaning, an attempt to preserve the fragile and the fleeting.
Steinbach compels us to see the familiar in a new light. His art is not about form, but about attention. Not about creation, but about selection. Not about what we see, but how we see it. And in this attentive gaze toward the ordinary, he achieves something remarkable: he reveals how any object can become a window into a personal story, a cultural code, or a shared human experience.
MACS is a contemporary art museum located on the site of the former Grand-Hornu industrial complex in Belgium, where contemporary artistic practices interact with a strong historical context. Its programming focuses on temporary exhibitions in which artists explore the relationships between the personal and the collective, the material and the symbolic. The site’s architecture — once a coal mining facility — amplifies the tension between past and present, giving exhibitions like Haim Steinbach’s an added layer of meaning and turning them into reflections on the transformation of objects, memory, and culture.