01.04.23 – 04.06.23, ACADEMIA, Various Artists

Als theoreticus kon er een tekst geschreven worden. Over een foto waarop een trommelaar afgebeeld stond. Een foto uit het archief van Walter Benjamin. Als theoreticus kon er dan een tekst geschreven worden die daarover ging. En ook over Henri Bergson en Marcel Proust en Gilles Deleuze en Sigmund Freud en Franz Kafka. En ook over het woord ‘abschied’ en dat dat in tweeën gesneden kan worden, en over de durée waaruit de dood gewist is, en over ‘das schloss’, en over herhaling en verschil, en over ‘jenseits des lustprinzips’, en over onze pogingen om met het niets om te gaan, en over ‘mémoires involontaires’, en over ‘the inbetweenness of things in general’, en over de retroreflectieve vezels die de spanning tussen het aanwezige en het verdwijnende stimuleren, en over de polyfonische harmonie van voorbijgaande gebaren die convergeren in een compositie van tegenstellingen.

Maar als kunstenaar is dat allemaal een beetje moeilijk. Schrijven over dingen. Schr schr ijven ov erdingen. Ov erdingen. Zelfs het performen opzich (niet an sich!) is al veel werk. Ook vervelend vaak om zo jezelf in de belangstelling te zetten. Bel angts elling. Bel angst elling. Liever helemaal niets zeggen. Zeker geen ingewikkelde dingen. Van ingewikkelde dingen komt denkerspurée. Denk en schrijfpurée van allerlij denkers en schrijvers. Hu hu ja ja ik ben wel geïnspireerd door de Ethica en het theologisch politiek traktaat van Spinoza en de boeken van Perec. Heb je Zijn en Tijd al eens gelezen? Eigenlijk is het wel ik twijfel dus ik denk dus ik ben in plaats van ik denk dus ik ben! En vergeet trouwens niet dat taal een misverstand is hé . . .

Liever helemaal niets zeggen. Niet eens echt performen. Gewoon een technisch medewerker zijn ofzo, weggecijferd op de achtegrond, maar stil en onmisbaar. Laat iets anders het werk voor je doen. Zeker als het vermoeiend zou zijn. Doe zelf iets gemakkelijk.

Waar weinig talent voor nodig is. Maar maak vooral geen woorden vuil aan woorden. En maak ook geen woorden vuil aan een tekst die je liever niet zou schrijven. Doe maar niet alsof en geef toe dat je ‘tijd en vrije wil’ toch nooit echt goed begrepen hebt.

de durée, wat was dat? pe purée, mat mas pat?

BELANGRIJK(!):

Wat je kan verwachten: bijna niets.

Wat er gezegd moest worden: toch maar iets.

On 15 March 2026, Joost Pauwaert activates his exhibition A Good Hammering with a performance.

For KIOSK, Pauwaert has created a large-scale installation in which heavy machinery, saw blades, and festive objects converge in an explosive visual language that evokes both wonder and unease. This new presentation promises to be an intense, physical experience that fully engages the unique character of the Anatomical Theatre.

Once a year, KIOSK invites a Belgian artist for a solo exhibition in the space of the former Anatomical Theatre. On 24 January 2026, Joost Pauwaert opens his new exhibition, A Good Hammering.

Trained as a photographer and shaped by his background as a carpenter, Joost Pauwaert has become known for his bold kinetic sculptures, installations, and performances that balance on the threshold between power and vulnerability, destruction and beauty, technique and poetry.

For KIOSK, Pauwaert has created a large-scale installation in which heavy machinery, saw blades, and festive objects converge in an explosive visual language that evokes both wonder and unease. This new presentation promises to be an intense, physical experience that fully engages the unique character of the Anatomical Theatre.

Joost Pauwaert ’s work explores the relationship between power, beauty, and poetry, often infused with a playful, childlike curiosity. He integrates familiar and symbolic imagery that evokes both recognition and tension. Pauwaert is drawn to the aesthetic of the imposing and the monumental, balancing this with a sense of the caricatural and symbolic wonder that softens its intensity and opens up imaginative possibilities.

About Joost Pauwaert

Joost Pauwaert (1985, Bretzenheim, DE) works and lives in Wilrijk, BE. In the past years his works have been exhibited in numerous exhibitions during several gallery group and solo exhibitions at BARBÉ and other venues such at Ooidonk Art Festival, C-MINE in Genk, Art Brussels w/ Dauwens & Beernaert, Art Cologne w/ Galerie Eric Mouchet (FR), Archipel at Deweer Gallery Estate (Otegem), Art Rotterdam w/ BARBÉ, Ponti gallery (Antwerp), Pizza gallery (Antwerp), Gevaertsdreef (Oudenaarde), PASS kunstroute (Lede) and Emergent in Veurne. After his 2nd solo The End Is Near in 2024 accompanied by the performance Apocalyptic Triumph Parade, one of the sculptures was acquired by Museum of Deinze en De Leiestreek. He also participated in the debut exhibition of ABBY, the contemporary museum in Kortrijk (BE).

Centered on the notion of protocol, Malgré Tout is an exhibition in motion, grounded in transmission, activation, and participation. The four invited artists—Marthe Merckx, Vicente Fuenzalida Lafourcade, and LAB D (Lars Bernakiewicz & Andreas D’hondt)—act simultaneously as authors, performers, and mediators of works that are re-enacted, transformed, and reinvented across different contexts.

Within contemporary art, a protocol refers to a set of instructions, rules, or conditions that determine how a work is realized without necessarily fixing its final form. Drawing on musical scores, dance notation, conceptual art, and performance, this approach shifts attention from the object to the process, from the author to the performer, and from the artwork as a product to the artwork as potential.

The protocol introduces a degree of indeterminacy, repetition, and variation. Each activation becomes a singular interpretation, situated within a specific context and in relation to particular bodies, temporalities, and relationships. The work thus exists malgré tout—despite everything: despite constraints, deviations, translations, and misunderstandings.

As a point of departure, Marthe Merckx, Vicente Fuenzalida Lafourcade, and LAB D activated a work by stanley brouwn: the idea of a square measuring 26 × 26 cm. This square is the work itself—an outline, a potential space in which art can emerge. From this premise, the format was gradually expanded into an empty square of 208 × 208 cm, conceived as eight exhibition spaces within the space.

These squares do not function as boundaries, but as points of departure. The invited artists are allowed to exceed the contours of their assigned zone, provided that the work originates there. Crucially, the square must always remain visible, however minimally. The spatial scenography acts as a constant: the patchwork flooring and the red-and-white striped walls remain unchanged throughout the entire exhibition. This intervention was jointly realized by Merckx, Fuenzalida Lafourcade, and LAB D and functions as a fixed framework within which successive interventions take place.

Following a simple protocol, Merckx, Fuenzalida Lafourcade, and LAB D invited eight young artists. After a period of two weeks, each artist selects another artist to continue working in the same space. This process of transmission repeats itself until the end of the exhibition. In this way, a dynamic of handover emerges in which artists curate one another. The exhibition unfolds as a chain of choices, driven by attention, curiosity, and a pronounced love for the work of others. The viewer is thus offered insight into how artists look at one another—despite everything, malgré tout.

Taking place in KIOSK's side space, the exhibition is organized in collaboration with the artist Nefeli Papadimouli and the École nationale supérieure d’art de Bourges. Malgré Tout mobilizes student communities in Ghent and Bourges to propose protocol-based works or to activate protocol-based works conceived by their peers.

In her exhibition Alles pelt zich, Veronika Eberhart presents new work unfolding the layered relationship between materials such as solid wood, veneer, and the machines and tools of woodworking themselves. Removed from their original function, the pieces displayed shift from being utilitarian devices to possessing autonomous existence, hovering between object and sacred presence. Fine incisions and nuanced gestures prompt questions of aesthetics, interiority, and personal experience.

With subtle surface interventions and manual processes, Eberhart considers how labor, design, and memory inscribe themselves into matter. Her works resist fixed interpretations and evoke an extimacy of space, where intimacy and distance blur.

About Veronika Eberhart

Veronika Eberhart is a visual artist and musician based in Vienna. The use of media in her works is distinguished both by its high musicality and the negotiation of conceptual issues with the sensitivity of artistic practices of feminist positions and art history. United in a transdisciplinary approach to video, sound, performance, or sculptural installation, her practice is based on theoretical and historical research and seeks formal translations.

Granted with the Theodor-Körner-Award for Fine Arts (2017) and the Schindler Stipendium at MAK Center for Art and Architecture in Los Angeles (2019). Recently, she has presented solo exhibitions at KOB- Museum for Contemporary Art, Eupen (2023), Kunsthalle Feldbach (2022), Kunsthalle Graz (2022), Bazament Art Space, Tirana (2018), New Jörg, Vienna (2018), Neue Galerie Graz / Studio (2017) and has appeared in group exhibitions at HKW Berlin (2024), ISCP Open Studio, New York (2023), Makey Garage Top, MAK Center Los Angeles (2020), Kunsthalle Vienna (Vienna Biennale 2019), Kharkiv Municipal Gallery (2019), Kunsthalle Exnergasse, Vienna (2018), rotor Graz (2018) and in the A-GALLERY, Tokyo (2017), among many others.

Parallel programme

• 10.11.25, 20:00
  Screening of films by Friedl Kubelka/vom Gröller, followed by a conversation with Friedl Kubelka/vom Gröller and Veronika Eberhart at Art Cinema OFFoff, Kunsthal Gent..
• 11.11.25, 20:00
  Screening of Impatience (1928) by Charles Dekeukeleire and 9 is one and 10 is none (2017) by Veronika Eberhart at Art Cinema OFFoff, Kunsthal Gent.

With A Spirit in Painting, Antwerp-based artist Tom Poelmans reveals the reverse sides of a wide selection of works spanning the past fifteen years, exhibited in the side gallery at KIOSK. Poelmans shows the reverse sides of a wide selection of paintings made over the past fifteen years. These unseen backs often bear titles, dates, sketches, material traces, and other marks: silent witnesses to the process and the life of the studio.

On December 6, two weeks prior to the closing of the show, all works will be turned around, revealing their front sides for the first time. That same day, the book A Spirit in Painting will be launched, published by MER. Alongside front and back views of a broad selection of works, the book includes drawings and poems by Tom Poelmans, as well as texts by people close to him.

The title of both the exhibition and the publication is a nod to the legendary 1981 show A New Spirit in Painting, held at the Royal Academy of Arts in London. That historic exhibition marked a renewed appreciation of painting as a medium, and offers a meaningful backdrop to Poelmans’ reflection on his own practice.

KIOSK opens the new exhibition season with Onder Verzachtende Omstandigheden, a solo exhibition by Belgian artist Leen Van Tichelen. The show is the result of GROUND ZERO /51.04536/3.71609, a multidisciplinary residency in which Van Tichelen collaborated with performer Fanny Vandesande, composer Esther Coorevits, and word artist Jonas Bruyneel.

Throughout the summer, KIOSK was transformed into a living studio - part laboratory, part rehearsal space - where image, language, movement, and sound intersected. Boundaries were questioned, shifted, and rewritten.

The exhibition brings together the traces of this process: remnants, transitions, and an ongoing search for form within a space in flux. Onder Verzachtende Omstandigheden is not an endpoint, but a temporary anchoring in a landscape that keeps on moving.

Due to illness, the performance on 18.09.25 at 20:30 has been cancelled. The exhibition remains open.

In 2025, NOON collective began developing And now the beginning is somewhere else – a performative installation that will evolve throughout the season 2025-2026. After a premiere at Beyond the Black Box in Antwerp in May 2025, a first series of adaptations of the installation takes place at the Zwarte Zaal of KASK & Conservatorium.

Over four days, NOON opens the doors of this immersive installation to the public. On Wednesday afternoon, students are invited to immerse themselves in a series of activations. On Thursday and Friday afternoons, visitors can explore and experience the installation, while on Thursday and Friday evenings, the work unfolds as a live performance.

On Sunday, NOON presents the first trial of And now the beginning is somewhere else: NEW LANDSCAPE STORIES – an extended version of their performative installation, developed in the atmosphere of a lab. And now… invites you in a shared landscape where performance and practices mingle, shaped by the impressions, interactions and transformations of the week. A shared Sunday afternoon to rest, play and imagine where it started, all over again.

About And now the beginning is somewhere else

And now the beginning is somewhere else is an immersive performative installation – a space you are invited to enter.

Through an extreme landscape, made out of the logic of foam, you make your way in between suspended time, traces of water and petrol. It seems like nothing can happen here. Yet, with time what simmers under the surface unveils itself. Balancing between stillness and motion, the landscape unravels its memories and narratives, from a long time ago - or maybe, now.

And now the beginning is somewhere else is a performative installation where you are invited inside of. Through sound, light, choreographic elements, and through polypropylene, living beings, water and foam, a world of interwoven relationships begins to emerge.

About NOON collective

NOON is a multidisciplinary collective creating performative installations rooted in questions of how we might be together differently. Their work explores encounters between human and non-human forces, shifting bodies, and the search for – or perhaps the emergence of – new forms of symbiosis. Through layered, sensory experiences, NOON invites us to imagine new modes of connection, cohabitation, and transformation.

Credits

• concept/performing: Iris Donders, Delphine Mertens
• concept/(end) direction: Judith Dhondt
• performing/creation: Im Kanokporn Vorapharuek
• sound creation: Lucie Grésil
• space development: Eline Harmse
• firstobject development: Edie de Vere
• costume creation: stef assandri
• light design: Caroline Mathieu
• dramaturgy: Sara Manente
• choreographic assistant: Anja Röttgerkamp, Janka De Waele
• production: Emma Steurs
• graphic design: Joram De Cocker
• polypropylen research: Elena Vloeberghen
• Co-production C-TAKT, KAAP & SoAP
• With the finan­ci­al sup­port of the Flemish Government and Stad Ghent
• Supported by BUDA, CAMPO, KASK & Conservatorium (HOGENT – Howest), KIOSK, De School van Gaasbeek, de Koer, de Verffabriek, A Two Dogs Company, Mouvance ASBL, Kunstenwerkplaats pianofabriek, and Garage 29

The second performance of GROUND ZERO also marks the opening of Onder Verzachtende Omstandigheden. The exhibition by Leen Van Tichelen brings together the traces of this process: remnants, transitions, and an ongoing search for form within a space in flux.

About the project

Throughout the summer months, KIOSK became the home of GROUND ZERO /51.04536/3.71609, a multidisciplinary residency led by visual artist Leen Van Tichelen, who invited performer Fanny Vandesande, composer Esther Coorevits, and word artist Jonas Bruyneel. Over three months, the artists collaborated across disciplines—image, word, movement, and sound—merging their practices into a fluid, site-responsive methodology.

While the gallery remained closed to visitors, KIOSK itself transformed into a living studio—part laboratory, part rehearsal space—where boundaries are tested, unraveled, and rewritten.

The title, GROUND ZERO /51.04536/3.71609, marks both a beginning and a place. The geographic coordinates point to the exact site of the performance, grounding the inquiry in a specific reality while opening space for new artistic trajectories to emerge.

Support the project

To financially support the project GROUND ZERO / 51.04536 / 3.71609, Leen Van Tichelen created a special edition. Here’s a warm invitation to visit the crowdfunding page on voordekunst.nl.

Throughout the summer months, KIOSK becomes the home of GROUND ZERO /51.04536/3.71609, a multidisciplinary residency led by visual artist Leen Van Tichelen, who invited performer Fanny Vandesande, composer Esther Coorevits, and word artist Jonas Bruyneel. Over three months, the artists collaborate across disciplines—image, word, movement, and sound—merging their practices into a fluid, site-responsive methodology.

While the gallery remains closed to visitors, KIOSK itself is transformed into a living studio—part laboratory, part rehearsal space—where boundaries are tested, unraveled, and rewritten.

Catch an early trace of this continuously unfolding project at Bijloke Wonderland, where GROUND ZERO reveals its first public moment, shaped as much by change as by the physical and conceptual landscape it occupies.

The title, GROUND ZERO /51.04536/3.71609, marks both a beginning and a place. The geographic coordinates point to the exact site of the performance, grounding the inquiry in a specific reality while opening space for new artistic trajectories to emerge.

Support the project

To financially support the project GROUND ZERO / 51.04536 / 3.71609, Leen Van Tichelen created a special edition. Here’s a warm invitation to visit the crowdfunding page on voordekunst.nl.