Eye Becomes Water

curatorial series

Eye Becomes Water took waiting as its conceptual starting point across four exhibitions and their public programmes, staged at Het Paviljoen between February and June 2025. The premise grew from the building itself, which once served as the waiting room for pregnant patients at the historic Bijloke hospital. After the hospital left the site in 1983 the pavilion became a storage space and lay dormant for years, out of sight and out of mind, before reopening in 2006 as a glass vitrine for exhibitions. Read through that history, waiting became not a passive or neutral state but one thick with temporality and bodily experience, shot through with power. It is a mode of alertness to our surroundings and a practice of care for others, an act of resilience against ongoing struggle, inflected throughout by gender and race, class and location.

The series opened with Sanie Irsay's 24 Hour Swan Lake, a video intervention that slowed a recording of the Bolshoi Theatre's 1984 Swan Lake to the span of a full day, roughly one frame each second. In the final years of the USSR, looped broadcasts of the ballet filled the television channels during moments of political crisis, from the deaths of Soviet leaders to the coup of 1991, and in 2022 it aired once more as the last independent Russian station signed off. Opening on the third anniversary of the invasion of Ukraine, Irsay's version holds that image in suspension, tuning attention to the slow emergencies we live inside, from Ukraine to Palestine. One evening the work was activated by Radio Svitlo, with readings, music and zine sales gathered around the screen.

The second exhibition, Crying could be a solvent, brought together Soraya Abdelhouaret and Shervin/e Sheikh Rezaei around waiting and the practice of alchemy. Taking its title from a poem by Gabriel Gauthier, the show made the pavilion a vessel for material transformation and for a quieter conversation about devotion and love, with love itself cast as the prima materia from which change begins. Glass ran through both practices. Abdelhouaret fused and corroded wine in place of tears, letting chemical process carry it towards some other state, while Rezaei worked the transparency of window glass, setting into it a drawing that reaches after amorous ecstasy and communion with the divine. At the centre of the room, her invitation to serve yourself was at once an offering and a farewell.

The third exhibition, that slab of outlaw time, gathered Zeynep Kayan, Amel Omar and Reinier Vrancken around the version of waiting that feels like lethargy, a prolonged watch in which everything appears to stand still while thought races and reality is quietly revised. Fittingly for a space that spent years as a forgotten store before becoming a stage of glass, their works press on the boundary between exterior and interior, between the outer shell and an inner fullness. They interrupt the habits of looking and the rhythm of perception, drawing the eye instead towards blind spots and the periphery.

The programme closed with Sacha Rey's But I'm a Cheerleader, a documentary shown as a video installation that turns waiting towards the question of equitable conditions in the arts. Each performer takes on the guise of a cheerleader while doing something physical, trampolining and climbing, skating and running, and speaks in the same breath about the discrimination and precarity of their working life. Named after Jamie Babbit's 1999 comedy, the piece brings the exploitation of the creative sector and the hard years after graduation into a room inside an art school, where the conversation lands close to home.