Eye Becomes Water

Curated together with Daphné Charitos, Jean Watt, Yasemin Köker, Abel Hartooni & Temitayo Olalekan

Eye Becomes Water is an exhibition programme which explores waiting as its conceptual starting point. A series of four exhibitions with accompanying public programmes will be hosted from mid-February 2025 to the end of June 2025.


The exhibition programme draws from Het Paviljoen’s history – one that has primarily passed down through oral storytelling and void of archival documentation. This void allows for speculative practices of/in the space. The position, and the action, of waiting, form the broad conceptual framework to guide artistic responses to the exhibition space. Waiting is of subjective multitudes – it is a mode of alertness to our surroundings, it is a practice of care for others, it is a revolutionary act of resilience against ongoing struggles, it is inflected with issues of gender, race, class, and location.


The programme featured works by the artists Sanie Irsay, with her video intervention titled ‘24h Swan Lake’, accompanied by a hearing session event by Radio Svitlo as part of the public programme; a duo show by Shervin/e Sheikh Rezaei & Soraya Abdelhouaret titled ‘Crying Could be a Solvent’, which explored the notion of alchemy in relation to waiting; a trio show by Zeynep Kayan, Amel Omar & Reinier Vrancken titled ‘the slab of outlaw time’, reffering to the tension and boundaries between exterior and interior, the outer shell and inner fullness; and a solo show by Sacha Rey titled ‘But I’m a Cheerleader’ which explores the challenges for equitable conditions in the creative arts. 


Photography credits go to Charlotte Daniëlse 

Driedee: Hatching from Scratch

Curated together with Abel Hartooni and Temitayo Olalekan

“Hatching from scratch” is an exhibition with works by 28 artists, whose practices reflect and re-articulate what three dimensionality encompasses today. Thinking through the body, the territory and the imaginary, these artists place us on a course with a variety of conceptual openings – which unfold in the exhibition space in a perpetual engagement with each other on questions regarding friction and subjective transformation.


The exhibition proposes the metaphor of an itch as a provocation. The scratch, a resistance to this discomfort, conveyed through the artists' material experimentation, activates their intimated impressions. What emerges from this dynamic interplay is the hatching – an opening which reshapes how the artists perceive, interact with, and inhabit concurrent multidimensional spaces.


The works in this exhibition address the body and its sensorial attachments to memory, ecological fragility, language and speculatory crossroads. Through multisensory and spatial approaches, the artists engage the audience in navigating foyers of imagination and inquiry, thus provoking conversation and other practices of seeing, sensing, and hatching – engaging us to start it all from scratch.


This exhibition gathers work by the following 28 artists: Eloïse Baele, Nele Bergmans, Fedora Boonaert, Fenn-Jonah Brookhuis, Eveline Bumba, María Burguera, Manoah Camporini, Ann De Nys, Irene Donatini, Elise El Yousfi, Dodi Espinosa, Janina Fritz, Yawen Fu, Alexis Gerlach, Luna Ireland, Lore Jacobs, Irma Janssens, Mara Jenny, Lennert Lefever, Nicolas Peeters, Dieuwke Raymaekers, Lieve Shukrani Simoens, Elisa Van Coster, Emile Van Helleputte, Eva van Tongeren, Rosa Westhaus, Ugo Woatzi and Indra Wouters.

The exhibition is realised in a collaboration between Kunstwerkt, Curatorial Studies at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Ghent and Kunsthal Mechelen.

Photography credits go to Lavinia Wout

Salad Days #4 Odd Chef’s Jell-O

Curated together with Manon Klein

Within the framework of Salad Days #4— which draws on a Shakespearean reference to evoke youthful days of joy, innocence, and possibility— we invite participating artists to reflect on their memories and personal stories by integrating the culinary as an additional layer of their artistic practices.

With its inherent ambiguity, the culinary is a space where labor, care, and creativity intertwine to shape social bonds and communities, fostering collective growth and sustainability. Referencing Sarah Ahmed’s concept of the ‘dining table’ as a kinship object, this workshop aims to converge diverse perspectives that might ignite new connections and pathways.


Looking back at the past century, gelatin emerged as a quick, versatile tool in the modern kitchen, symbolizing the rise of convenience foods while elevating simple ingredients into creative dishes. Though gelatin-based dishes became staples of social gatherings, they were primarily marketed to housewives as time-saving solutions that also subtly promised to help maintain a slim figure. Beneath jello’s polished image then laid deep-seated gender expectations. In this light, gelatin serves as a historical lens, reflecting societal norms and pressures, particularly those imposed on women.


This gathering invites both exhibited artists and the audience to come together at the dining table. The act of preparing and sharing food unfolds into a collective ritual of artistic expression— where stories, flavors, and ideas simmer and blend. In this setting, the table, traditionally a site of nourishment and communal experience, transforms into a stage for new narratives, encouraging participants to explore and exchange.


Photography credits go to Johan Poezevara

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Gathering #2: To Weave a Story

Curated together with Sjoerd Beijers

What stories have shaped our world since childhood? Fair maidens, jesters and knights aim to portray the plentiful landscape through which the male Hero conquers his quest. Conventional stories revolve around this male protagonist, causing other characters, non-human life and the environment to only enter the story by proving their usefulness to him. The real world mirrors these conventions, excluding diverse stories, the marginalized and the unproductive from being heard.

In light of fostering different perspectives, ‘To Weave a Story’ sets out to dismantle the standard form of storytelling by including the environment and its margins. A selection of artworks forms the basis from which we imagine props, fictional characters, natural environments and backdrops. These deconstructed elements of the story become building blocks for a small workshop on storytelling. By weaving together these elements in various ways, diverse stories will emerge, through which other forms of life, and other ways of living may take the spotlight.


On the 30th of March, the exhibition will open to the public. The displayed works invite the viewers to form personal interpretations and narratives. The stories resulting from the workshop become the foundation for hourly, oral storytelling sessions. Throughout this gathering, we hope to not only diversify that which is represented but also seek diversification in how stories are told. This is an effort to find ways of storytelling that don’t comply with the conventional negation of unseen and nonsensical truths. Instead, the program aims to speculatively fabulate on the role of storytelling as a ritual, in which non-anthropocentric, queer and anti-productionist stories may unfold.



Artists
Aidan Abnet
Justine Grillet
Guillaume Jannes
Jochem Mestriner
Samuel White Evans
& myself

Writers
Isa Vink
Jule Köepke
Jesse Kempkes
Babette Lagrange

Photography credits go to Johan Poezevara

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Gathering #1: Home Sweet Home

Curated together with Sjoerd Beijers

What are some rituals that make us feel at home? What is inherently a home? And what does it consist of? Is it material or immaterial, a space or a body? What kind of ingredients constitute a home? Memories, people, emotions? Is it a shelter, or a sanctuary? Is it something we run from or confide in when things are difficult?

Within Western cultures, homes and houses are closely linked together. With the enclosure of the common land, communal structures have been replaced by private homes. This binary between the public and the private also encloses our relationship with others, to nature and knowledge.


In this workshop—with room for eight participants—we will explore different notions of what a home could be and what a home means to them. Ultimately seeking alternative kinships towards the essence of what a home is. By playing with the common signifiers of what constitutes a home, we aim to collectively imagine alternate views on what a home is, or could potentially be.

Through performance work and (edible) sculptures, the organizing and invited artists will help us rethink the communal aspect of the home. Paired to this, there will be a reading, in which we collectively reflect upon the material and seek new knowledge and conceptions to emerge. Through a combination of objects brought by the participants and materials we prepared, we will ultimately use these new ideas to build our home collectively.



This collectively built home will later open to the public in the form of an exhibition, further breaking this binary between public and private. Temporarily the cultural norms are subverted within the space and the home becomes an open place, a meeting ground and a place for collective reflection.


Performance by 
Adriana Joëlle

Contributions by
Lorenço
Kyra Nijskens
Abel Hartooni
Beljita Gurung
Lizzy Jongedijk
Seppe-Hazel Laeremans
Jessica Marlieke van Egmond

Photography credits go to Isaac Ponseele