Art World Map
a network analysis of the art world in Flanders and Brussels 2018-2022
This website is an interactive graph mapping the connections between contemporary artists and art institutions in Flanders and Brussels from 2018 to 2022.1
Methodology
A list of around 300 contemporary art institution was taken from the Flanders Art Institute.1 It includes museums, public galleries, project spaces, residencies, festivals and some commercial galleries.
A database was created, manually recording all connections these institutions had from January 2018 until October 2022 based on their websites' archives.
A connection could be a solo exhibition, a group exhibition, a repeated performance or a residency. No distinction is made between the different types of connections.
After merging duplicates, this data set contained around 16,000 artists.
From here, all artists with only one connection were filtered out.
This leaves a network of 2700 artists who had connections with at least two of the given 300 institutions from 2018-2022.
This network of 3000 actors was analysed using the network visualisation software Gephi and Cytoscape.
Within Gephi, the layout of the network was determined using the ForceAtlas2 algorithm.1
A modularity analysis determined 15 classes within the network. A class is a group with higher connections within itself than towards other actors. Each of the 15 groups received a unique colour within the network. This means, all actors of the same colours are part of the same group, even when spatially separated.
You can navigate the network by browsing around, zooming in and out, jumping from one node to the next or by searching for a specific actor.
Click on the menu button in the top right corner to toggle a search bar.
You can search for either an institution or an artist.
Selecting a search result will unfold the node's immediate network
Clicking anywhere on the canvas again reveals the full network in it's original layout
