02.04.26 – 19.04.26, #191 Lotte Vanpuyvelde, Riet Van Lysebettens, Frilly Blouse Syndrome

In een ademende, veranderlijke ruimte raakt Washing The Soul aan een innerlijke verschuiving, een beweging van loslaten en terugkeren. In die omwenteling wordt het zelf zachter, ontvankelijk voor wat het overstijgt. Wat hier resoneert, is een stille toenadering tot het onnoembare.

Dit project brengt het werk van twee beeldhouwers samen. Lenie creëert witte, humoristische mengwezens: combinaties van verschillende levende wezens die samen een nieuw, eigen universum vormen.

Alyssia Reale vertrekt vanuit alledaagse consumptieobjecten, vaak speelgoed, en onderzoekt hoe hun betekenis vervaagt door tijd, gebruik en herinnering. Met felle kleuren en speelse vormen balanceert haar werk tussen herkenbaarheid en abstractie.

Rippelstippel fungeert als verbindend element in de ruimte en versterkt de samenhorigheid tussen beide oeuvres. Het sobere kleurgebruik van Lenie vormt een spannend contrast met Alyssia’s opvallende kleuren, waardoor hun werken elkaar aanvullen en versterken.

Voor er nog maar sprake is van een schilderij, is er het object.
Deze objecten zijn vaak strak, een beetje afgeleefd en industrieel van aard.
Ik vind ze op straat, in afvalcontainers of ik krijg ze.
Ik verzamel ze en gebruik ze om een stilleven mee te bouwen, vanuit dit stilleven start ik dan met schilderen.
In deze MAP probeer ik hun aanwezigheid in mijn praktijk verder te onderzoeken door te kijken naar wat er gebeurt als ik mijn stillevens op zichzelf tentoonstel, in mijn schilderijen te spelen met hun aanwezig- en afwezigheid alsof ze ingeschakeld zijn of juist uitgevallen, door zelfgemaakte objecten te laten zien en te kijken wat er gebeurt wanneer dit samenkomt.

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.