22.01.26 – 01.02.26, #187 Luka Van der Putten, AAN/UIT

White picket fence: a typical family, a typical house, typical actions. What happens if these typicality’s were broken or forgotten?

Two unlikely image-worlds are brought together: the staged American nuclear-test families and the simplified domestic scenes found in children’s drawings. Both operate as fictions – idealized models of family life rehearsed rather than lived.Within the fragile structure of the cardboard house, fragments of this script unfold. These are not moments of intimacy, but the residue of gestures remembered from elsewhere.What follows is not collapse, nor the emergence of a new narrative. Bodies keep rehearsing, as if repetition alone might hold the fiction together.

The exhibition FROM WHERE WE GROW by Clair Bravo & Noé Znidarsic brings together two photographic approaches that explore the construction of identity in their practice through their respective experiences.

In their ongoing work Where We Bloom, Clair Bravo explores queer rural communities and the ways queer people inhabit, navigate, and transform rural spaces in France. Through portraits, landscapes, and documentary fragments, the project reflects on belonging, visibility, and how queer presence reshapes environments so often imagined as conservative or heteronormative. Rooted in a rural perspective shaped by their own upbringing, the work questions what it means to be queer beyond the city’s walls, how queer lives take root, unfold, and endure in places where they are frequently overlooked. The series of analog images offers a soft cartography of queer presence across the countryside. During three months of travel, they grew close to people they met, encountered a wide range of kinship practices, laughed deeply and often, allowed time to slow, and confided doubts, worries, and care.

In MODEL CARD, Noé Znidarsic explores the temporality of the fashion world, focusing on suspended moments that often escape the collective imagination: the pauses backstage between fittings, the silence of casting rooms, the seemingly endless waiting. These intervals reveal another facet of modeling, one that resists spectacle and glamour. The project appropriates and subverts the ambiguous form of the model card, also called a “composite” in French. Traditionally, this object serves both as a professional identity card and as a promotional tool, designed to attract clients through standardized information: height, measurements, hair color, and so on. Reduced to a formula, the body becomes data — a surface to be consumed. By reworking this format, MODEL CARD shifts its original utilitarian function and questions the very structures that frame the lives of young models. “In this continuity, the project establishes a link with the portraits and images I have produced over the past years, deliberately replaying the same visual schemes as those of traditional model cards.” Being a “model” — a term derived from the Latin modulus, diminutive of modus (measure, standard) — thus becomes a field of reversal. By subsequently reintroducing people who are no longer part of the industry, the project proposes an alternative reading of the body represented: a body that is no longer merely a surface for standardized projection, but one that exposes and reveals the mechanisms of representation and the standardization of beauty.

Together, these two bodies of work invite viewers to reflect on how identity, community, and self- expression are both constructed and performed, and how spaces—whether rural landscapes or fashion worlds—are reshaped by those who inhabit them.

Much like the submersed swimming tunnels constructed for aquariums, permitting human guests to freely yet curiously peruse a vivid enclosure beneath teeming spectacles of sea life (fish, vegetation, beams of sunlight), & Kasquarium* homages that iconic tourist passageway design in our own Master Project Space. Dually, this window corridor poses a sense of structural containment that aquatic pets must endure in a tank, a phenomenon simultaneously replicated here. Glug! blub! 🫧 Featuring projector art (to simulate image), biodegradable and recyclable glittery products to exaggerate overarching sunlight, Spectacle the Turtle at the photo-op station locally discovered pebbles and shiny materials as case-by-case decorative tunnel-covering accurate depictions of specific aquatic viscera, speaker(s) looping low volume nautically appropriate ASMR (bubbling, underwater vibrations, occasional bouts of realistic creature noises), and even a fun surreal surprise beyond the walls (look out for the bonus octopus! 😉) the Hogent-navigating pedestrian is invited to treat this shortcut as a transportative field trip outside their field of study (minus those deriving organic pigments from algae in the textile department and 3D printing lab, of course). 

*(named for the replica’s immediate proximity to similarly educational activities in KASK’s network buildings, for the marine presentational style passerby will be surrounded by as they traverse this area, and to be tongue in cheek about how the end of the school’s name is “& Conservatorium”) in order to stage the institutional functionality of an aquarium building attachment as the sort of afterthought it seems. Featuring projector art (for moving image) by lining about four securely fastened projectors across the center of floor for guests to walk/“swim” around [disguised and repurposed as tower viewers], biodegradable glitter to exaggerate overarching sunlight, transparent blue photo paper to scale, locally discovered shiny materials as case-by-case decorative tunnel-covering accurate depictions of specific aquatic viscera, speaker(s) looping low volume nautically appropriate ASMR (bubbling, underwater vibrations, occasional bouts of realistic creature noises), the Hogent-navigating pedestrian is invited to treat this shortcut as a transportative field trip outside their field of study (minus those deriving organic pigments from algae in the textile department and 3D printing lab, of course).

Come to the <& Kasquarium> closing event on 4 December for some edible glitter-topped wine or juice and algaeholic green 🔞 or non-alcoholic ocean blue Jell-O shots :) 🥂🧪✨🖲️ You can even enter the raffle to win your own [Sea Monkeys] to bring to life in water at home! 🦐🧜‍♂️🎁

Alalú can be a collection of objects, an autobiographical exhibition, a delicate piece of work, a drawing made during a phone call, a memory of Osorno, an illustrated poetry book hanging on the avenue, a way to put a child to sleep, a notebook left unfinished, a bird that follows you, a story told many times, a way to pass the time, a presentation, an intense cold, an amulet, an exercise in memory, a lapse, something that is germinating, three sighs, a glass of water, or even a murder.

-- Ik ga proberen een tekstje te schrijven voor grondwerken.

-- Is er iets wat er zeker in moet?

• Volgens mij niet veel.

Lately, I was thinking about becoming one with my doll,
transforming into her, or perhaps already being connected
to her subconsciously, even without fully realizing it.
How does it feel to be her? 

This project is a personal reinterpretation of the Slavic ritual
of burning Marzanna, a doll representing the death of winter and the coming of spring.
By bringing this tradition into a new context - both geographically and
emotionally - I reflect on leaving behind my past and creating space for
new beginnings.

The circle and its shifting meanings. In my work, the circle is never fixed — it transforms, adapts, and takes on new roles within a fictional world I create. I play with different shapes and their possible meanings, but the circle remains central, often acting as both a symbol and a structural element. It becomes a way to explore how form and composition can carry layered associations, while still leaving space for ambiguity and imagination.

Born from a Wish Born from a Wish Born from a Wish Born from a Wish Born from a Wish Born from a Wish Born from a Wish Born from a Wish Born from a Wish Born from a Wish Born from a Wish Born from a Wish Born from a Wish Born from a Wish Born from a Wish Born from a Wish Born from a Wish Born from a Wish Born from a Wish Born from a Wish Born from a Wish Born from a Wish Born from a Wish Born from a Wish Born from a Wish Born from a Wish

While yall have been weeding your gardens and polishing your grills, Putzco had been working on a new set of exciting garden essentials. They will be on display at MAP from 8.05 till 18.05.25. Join us at the opening 8.05 from 18:00.

MAP stands for MAsterProjectruimte (Master Project Space). Throughout the academic year, the Glazen Gang on Campus Bijloke is the playground of several master's students.

“It could float, of course,

but would rather

plumb rough matter.

Airy and shapeless thing,

it needs

the metaphor of the body,”

• Poem, Mary Oliver, ‘Dream Work’ (1986)

A child hides under a sheet to play the ghost; a chair sits beneath a dust cover to protect it from paint. Their uncertain shapes are understood based on previous encounters. Concealing becomes part of the process of knowing, understanding the component parts of recognition — vague form, rough size, surrounding areas. Taken away from their usual environments Gabrielle Barbé’s hidden forms in On New Ground are twice-removed — from context, and from view. Edges, corners, and curves wrapped in fabric signal to a varied, semi-recognisable beneath. And then again, they are thrice removed. Working with the already-discarded objects of kerbsides and street corners, one stage of transition has occurred by the time Barbé intervenes. After moving from inside to outside, miscellaneous effects are pilfered, brought back indoors, repurposed and wrapped. Boundaries between public and private are blurred, with interior objects taking on new exteriorised meaning, only to be replaced again inside.

Amongst this unknowing is a certainty of these objects’ substance, giving density to the airiness of their textile wrappings. As Mary Oliver muses of the human spirit in her 1986 Poem — “it could float of course,/ but would rather/ plumb rough matter”. Barbé’s woven fabrics suggest similarly that they could be drifting away if untethered, but have come to rest stretched around a series of weighty forms. Without them they would collapse — airy, shapeless. Reminiscent in their own way of bandaged body parts, the works in On New Ground also recall the multiple ways in which fabric finds solidity. They speak to shapes wrapped around shoulders and feet; cast out on shop awnings, and tent poles; pleated over windows and spread around furniture. These appearances easily start to mimic each other — a covered chair looking rather like a seated figure, a curtain rail like the waist of a skirt. Barbé’s “metaphor of the body” is not just the suggestion of human bodies, but interior and structural ones too. Buildings and their rooms are their own types of skeletons. On New Ground bounces from the indoors to the outdoors, the interior to the architectural, intimacy to publicness. Under cover, hidden forms offer ways of gesturing to these in-betweens — a morse coded attempt at making sense of one another.

•  Jean Watt

Gabrielle Barbé is currently completing her MA in textile design at KASK & Conservatorium. Jean Watt is studying at the curatorial studies postgraduate programme.