Guillaume Bijl (1946) is a Belgian installation artist who is known for his large-scale installations in which he literally reconstructs everyday reality. These range from hairdressing salons, driving schools to installations of department stores on an identical scale. Using these 'decors of his time' he creates sort of banal installations that are taken out of context, causing realism to skip over to surrealism and absurdism. His work is seen as a reaction to the conceptual art of the 1970s, which in his view was way out of touch from the wider public and therefore in need of an alternative. In this artist talk he goes deeper into his own background, how he started as an artist and what inspired him. He reviews several of his works and mentions recurring elements such as the use of kitsch and his questioning of the banality in our society. The setting of the conversation is his installation 'New Democratic Party' (NDP), which was shown at West in 2017 as part of the group exhibition 'See How the Lands Lay'.