06.02.25, 19:00, Mira Thompson

In this lecture, artist Ahmet Öğüt explores the strategic use of humour in his practice as a means to disarm power, provoke thought, and engage audiences. Drawing from a range of works and collaborations, Öğüt reflects on how irony and playful subversion can become powerful tools for navigating complex political and social realities.

Born in Silvan, Diyarbakir, Ahmet Öğüt completed his BA from the Fine Arts Faculty at Hacettepe University, Ankara, MA from Art and Design Faculty at Yıldız Teknik University, Istanbul. He works across different media and has exhibited widely, more recently with solo exhibitions in institutions including Art on the Underground & New Contemporaries, Van Abbemuseum, State of Concept Athens, Kunstverein Dresden, Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Chisenhale Gallery; Berkeley Art Museum; and Kunsthalle Basel. He has also participated in numerous group exhibitions, including; Singapore Biennale (2025); Sense of Safety, Yermilov Centre Kharkiv (2024); Dhaka Art Summit (2023); 17th Istanbul Biennial, Istanbul, (2022); FRONT International 2022, Cleveland Triennial for Contemporary Art, Ohio (2022); Asia Society Triennial: We Do Not Dream Alone (2021); In the Presence of Absence, Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam (2020); Zero Gravity at Nam SeMA, Seoul Museum of Art (2019); Echigo Tsumari Art Triennale (2018); the British Art Show 8 (2015-2017); the 13th Biennale de Lyon (2015); Performa 13, the Fifth Biennial of Visual Art Performance, New York (2013); the 7th Liverpool Biennial (2012); the 12th Istanbul Biennial (2011); the New Museum Triennial, New York (2009); and the 5th Berlin Biennial for Contemporary Art (2008). Öğüt was awarded the Visible Award for the Silent University (2013); the special prize of the Future Generation Art Prize, Pinchuk Art Centre, Ukraine (2012); the De Volkskrant Beeldende Kunst Prijs 2011, Netherlands; and the Kunstpreis Europas Zukunft, Museum of Contemporary Art, Germany (2010). He co-represented Turkey at the 53rd Venice Biennale (2009). Lives and works in Amsterdam and Istanbul. His works in institutional collections such as Guggenheim Museum New York; Kadist, San Francisco, US - Paris; Rennie Collection, Vancouver; Sammlung Goetz, Munich; Frans Hals Museum; FRAC Nord-Pas de Calais, Dunkerque; Laumeier Sculpture Park, St. Louis; KIASMA Museum of Contemporary Art, Hesinki; Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven; Fondazione Giuliani, Rome; MSU Broad Art Museum, East Lansing; Vehbi Koç Foundation, Istanbul.

Archivo Fantasma — Spectral Fictions presents different cinematic approaches and strategies of counter — and alter — narratives to address official archives and records that Laura Huertas Millán’s practice engages with. It posits fiction as a critical and emancipatory strategy for engaging with colonial violence, institutional silences, historical erasures, and the ideological construction of collective memory. This artistic practice draws from Latin American traditions of meta-fiction and epistemic disobedience, emphasizing how historical records are shaped by regimes of truth that legitimize certain epistemologies while excluding others. This talk will present her critical series on “ethnographic fictions”, and a recent investigation inspired by Saidiya Hartman’s “critical fabulation”, a history “written with and against the archive” to articulate how fiction can serve as a reparative method, to address not only the documents of the past but also the languages shaping our present and future.

Laura Huertas Millan is a Colombian and French artist and filmmaker based in Brussels, Belgium. Selected in major cinema festivals such as the Berlinale, Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF), Rotterdam International Film Festival, New York Film Festival and Cinéma du Réel, her films have been awarded at the Locarno Film Festival, FIDMarseille, Doclisboa and Videobrasil, among others. More than twenty retrospectives and focuses on her work have been organized internationally, in cinematheques (Toronto ́s TIFF Lightbox, Harvard ́s Film Archive, Bogota ́s cinematheque, Austrian Film Museum, Tabakalera); museums (CA2M, CCA Glasgow, OCA Norway); film festivals (Mar del Plata, Rencontres du Documentaire de Montréal, FICUNAM, Curtocircuito); and non-fiction seminars (The Flaherty seminar, DocsKingdom). Her films have been featured in solo exhibitions at the MASP Sao Paulo, Maison des Arts de Malakoff and Medellin ́s Modern Art Museum; in biennials such as the Liverpool Biennial, FRONT Triennial, Videonnale and ScreenCity Biennial; and screenings in museums such as the Centre Pompidou, the Jeu de Paume, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. Her work is part of private and public collections such as KADIST, CNAP, Banco de la República de Colombia, CIFO Miami, and FRAC Lorraine. Since 2019, she is part of the curatorial and research collective Counter Encounters, which has developed projects at the Centre Pompidou and Tate Modern.

Marwa Arsanios is an artist, filmmaker and researcher whose work can take the form of installation, performance and moving image. She reconsiders the political development of the second half of the twentieth century from a contemporary perspective, focusing on gender relations, collectivism, urbanism and industrialization. Her research work includes many disciplines and is deployed in numerous collaborative projects.

Several solo exhibitions have been dedicated to her work: Heidelberger Kunstverein, Germany (2023); Mosaïc Rooms, London (2022); Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati (2021); Skuc Gallery, Ljubljana (2018); Beirut Art Center (2017); Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2016); Witte de With, Rotterdam (2016); Kunsthalle Lissabon, Lisbon (2015); and Art in General, New York (2015).

Her work has also been featured in numerous group exhibitions including: Documenta 15, Kassel (2022); 5th Mardin Bienali (2022); 3rd Autostrada Biennale, Pristina (2021); 11th Berlin Biennale (2020); The Renaissance, Chicago (2020); 2nd Lahore Biennale (2020); Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna (2019); 1st Sharjah Architecture Triennial (2019); SF Moma, San Francisco (2019); 1st Warsaw Biennial (2019); 14th Sharjah Biennale (2019); Nottingham Contemporary (2017); Maxxi Museum, Rome (2017); Sursock Museum, Beirut (2016); Ludwig Museum, Cologne (2016); Thessaloniki Biennial (2015); Home Works Forum, Ashkal Alwan, Beirut (2010, 2013, 2015); New Museum, New York (2014); 55th Venice Biennial (2013); M HKA, Antwerp (2013), In Other Words, nGbK, Berlin (2012); or the 12th Istanbul Biennial (2011).

Her films have been screened at Cinéma du Réel, Paris (2021); Rotterdam Film Festival (2021); EMAF, Osnabrück (2021); Film Fest, Hamburg (2020); State of Concept, Athens (2020); FID Marseille (2019); tiff, Toronto (2019); RIDM, Montreal (2019); Berwick Film & Media Arts Festival (2019); Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (2017); Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris (2011, 2017); Berlin International Film Festival (2010, 2015); and e-flux storefront, New York (2009).

She received the Georges de Beauregard International Prize at FID Marseille (2019), the Special Prize of the Pinchuk Future Generation Art Prize (2012), and was nominated for the Paulo Cunha e Silva Art Prize (2017) and the Han Nefkens Foundation Award (2014). She was awarded the Akademie Schloss Solitude scholarship in Stuttgart in 2014 and the Tokyo Wonder Site, Tokyo Arts and Space in 2010. She is a co-founder of the 98weeks Research Project.

Am I the only one who is like me? This is a question characteristic of Saddie Choua’s (°Bree, 1971) life and work. It problematizes the position of the solitary I that is also never disconnected from the other. The power order that conditions the solitary “I”, is another central subject. Where does this otherness sit in the hierarchy of power? Where is her oppression and exploitation concealed or exoticed?

Saddie Choua asks us to think about how we consume images and dialogues about the other and how they affect our self-image and historical consciousness. How can we intervene in the images that write our history and conceal social struggle? Do we first have to refute memory to tell another story? Or is the removal or recombining of certain associations and references already sufficient to create a different history and self-image?

Saddie Choua's work can therefore be read as a fragmented self-reflective visual essay that questions the relationship between maker and image. How do you make blind spots that just invite you to forget visible? How to speak and depict differently from a subalternal position, or is it just the concept of "the other" that confines her in dominant images and narratives?

Saddie Choua lives and works in Brussels and Ostend. She uses meta-documentary tactics, collage, own (film) material, re-appropriation of popular intercultural formats and autobiographical elements to put racism, discrimination against women and class, and her cats in the spotlight. She creates a new pseudo-realistic imaginary world that is at once highly recognizable and utterly alien. It is her way of undermining the (visual) language of our media and of sharpening the critical and political gaze of her audience. The challenge is to create 'situations' that reveal the power structures behind the images that we internalize and reproduce. Saddie is a doctoral researcher at the RITCS in Brussels and a lecturer at Sint Lucas Antwerp and the RITCS. She is one of the laureates of the Belgian Art Prize 2020.

Saddie Choua had solo and group exhibitions at, among others, BOZAR, Brussels, 2014; WIELS, Brussels, 2015; Marrakech Biennial, Marrakech, 2016; MU.ZEE, Ostend, 2016; Showroom, Sint Lucas School of Arts, Antwerp, 2016; KIOSK, Ghent, 2017; Festival Concreto, Fortaleza, 2017; Kooshk-Air Antwerp, Tehran, 2018; Kanal-Centre Pompidou, Brussels, 2018-2019; Savvy Contemporary, Berlin, 2018; Akademie der Künste der Welt, Cologne, 2018; Villa Empain, Brussels, 2018; Contour Biennal, Mechelen, 2019, Biennale Warszawa, Warsaw, 2019; La Veronica Gallery, Modica, 2020; Les Rencontres Internationales Paris/Berlin, 2020; Centre Wallonie-Bruxelles, Paris, 2020; Temporary Gallery, Cologne, 2020; Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna, 2020; Extra City, Antwerp, 2021; Kunstverein Hamburg 2021; Kadist, Paris, 2021; Undercurrent Gallery, NYC, 2021. Her work is in national and international private and public collections.

Known for his multifaceted and divergent approach to art making, with works that range from sculpture and installation to painting and drawing, Kasper Bosmans’ practice is a complex concoction of high art and literature, popular culture, mythology and anthropology, viewed through a queer and playfully minimalist lens that subversively observes and reinvents narratives that dominate the world around us. Taking an editorial approach, Bosmans cuts, pastes and brings together these anecdotes and stories, which traverse all histories, cultures and societies, and identifies off-beat, idiosyncratic and poetic resonances thatbind form and meaning together in what is essentially a conceptual practice.

Nothing is off-limits for Bosmans, who has a particular soft spot for more obscure, queer and marginalized anecdotes, from stories of cross-dressing saints to examples of celibacy and monogamy in the animal kingdom. Bosmans prods, pokes and teases out connections in his work that are significant to his personal world, but the resulting narratives cannot help but take on a universal resonance.

Why do artists write novels? What does the artist’s novel do to the visual arts? How should such a novel be experienced?

Artist David Maroto presents The Artist’s Novel: The Novel as a Medium in the Visual Arts – a research project that finds its momentum in the current international art scene, where the debate about the hybridisation of visual arts and literature is becoming increasingly prominent. In recent years, there has been a proliferation of visual artists who create novels as part of their wider art projects. They do so in order to address artistic issues by means of novelistic devices, favouring a sort of art predicated on process and subjectivity, introducing notions that have traditionally adscribed to literature, such as fiction, narrative, identification, and imagination. In this sense, it is possible to speak of a new medium in the visual arts (exactly as video or performance, for example); yet, very little is known about it.

By discussing a number of key case studies, David’s presentation will aim to elucidate the pressing questions posed by the emergence of a new artistic medium with a theoretical and practice-based approach that critically examines the different ways contemporary artists have employed the artist’s novel. The intention is not to fix a definition of what the artist’s novel is, but rather to situate it within the broader field of the visual arts in the hopes of sparking a much-needed discussion about a practice that has long been ignored by the main critical strands in art discourse.

David Maroto

David Maroto is a Spanish visual artist based in the Netherlands and a PhD from the Edinburgh College of Art, with a research project called The Artist’s Novel: The Novel as a Medium in the Visual Arts. It has been published in a two-volume book in English (Mousse Publishing, 2020) and Spanish (Greylock Editorial, 2025).

Maroto has an extensive international artistic practice: residence in URRA (Buenos Aires); Vigil Gonzales Gallery (Buenos Aires); Havana Biennial; Biennale Warszawa; Kanal Centre Pompidou (Brussels); W139 (Amsterdam); A Tale of a Tub (Rotterdam); Artium Museum of Contemporary Art (Vitoria); Extra City (Antwerp); S.M.A.K. (Ghent); EFA Project Space (New York); Pedrami Gallery (Antwerp); West (The Hague); The Opening Gallery (New York); SALT (Istanbul), a. o.

In 2011, he spent time at a residency in ISCP New York, where he met curator Joanna Zielińska and began a collaboration called The Book Lovers, a research project based on the creation of a collection and bibliography of artists' novels with the continuous support of M HKA (Antwerp). The Book Lovers explore the different ways in which the artist’s novel is employed as a medium in the visual artists, exactly as installation, video, or performance. The collection and bibliography are complemented with a series of exhibitions, performance programmes, publications, commissions, and pop-up bookstores. This collaboration has enabled them to engage with a host of international institutions, including Whitechapel Gallery (London); Museum of Modern Art (Warsaw); Kunstinstituut Melly (Rotterdam); CCA Glasgow; Fabra i Coats (Barcelona); Index (Stockholm); De Appel (Amsterdam); Ujazdowski Castle Centre for Contemporary Art (Warsaw); a. o.

David has published numerous artists’ novels, essays, interviews, and articles, and edited various publications, including Artist Novels (Sternberg Press, 2015); Tamam Shud (Sternberg Press, 2018); and Obieg magazine no. 8, 'Art & Literature: A Mongrel's Guide' (2018), as well as the paper ‘Valid Fictional Contributions to Non-Fictional Debates: Fictocritical Writing in Artistic Research’ (Acta Academiae Artium Vilnensis). He has also written for Caja Negra Editorial (Buenos Aires); EXIT art journal (Madrid); and Artforum.

David also has ample experience as a guest lecturer at international art academies, such as Dutch Art Institute; Gerrit Rietveld Academy; XPUB Piet Zwart Institute; Sint Lucas Antwerpen; Master Institute of Visual Cultures in Den Bosch; Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Lyon; Ecole Cantonale d’Art du Valais, Sierre (Switzerland); Glasgow School of Art; and Stockholm University, a.o. In addition to lecturing, he has designed and taught diverse courses, workshops, and seminars, such as the Collective Novel Workshop at Museo Reina Sofía, Madrid.

David Reinfurt is an independent graphic designer in New York City. He graduated from the University of North Carolina in 1993 and received an MFA from Yale University in 1999. On the first business day of 2000, David formed O-R-G inc., a flexible graphic design practice composed of a constantly shifting network of collaborators. Together with graphic designer Stuart Bertolotti-Bailey, David established Dexter Sinister in 2006 as a workshop in the basement at 38 Ludlow Street on the Lower East Side in New York City. Together with Stuart Bertolotti-Bailey and Angie Keefer, David set up a non-profit institution called The Serving Library in 2011 which maintains a physical collection of art and design works, stages events, and publishes an annual journal. David was 2010 United States Artists Rockefeller Fellow in Architecture and Design and 2017 Mark Hampton Rome Prize Fellow in Design at the American Academy in Rome. His work is included in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, Walker Art Center, Centres Georges Pompidou, and the Whitney Museum of American Art. David has written two books, Muriel Cooper (MIT Press, 2017) and A New Program For Graphic Design (Inventory Press/DAP, 2019) and is Professor of the Practice at Princeton University.

Due to personal circumstances, the KASK lecture of Marwa Arsanios is cancelled.

Marwa Arsanios’ practice tackles structural questions using different devices, forms and strategies. From architectural spaces, their transformation and adaptability throughout conflict, to artist-run spaces and temporary conventions between feminist communes and cooperatives, the practice tends to make space within and parallel to existing art structures allowing experimentation with different kinds of politics. Film becomes another form and a space for connecting struggles in the way images refer to each other.

In the past four years Arsanios has been attempting to think about these questions from a new materialist and a historical materialist perspective with different feminist movements that are struggling for their land. She tries to look at questions of property, law, economy and ecology from specific plots of land. The main protagonists become these lands and the people who work them. Her research includes many disciplines and is deployed in numerous collective methodologies and collaborative projects.

Solo shows include: BAK Utrecht (2024), Kunsthalle Bratislava (2023), Heidelberger Kunstverein (2023), Mosaic Rooms, London (2022), Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati (2021); Skuc Gallery, Ljubljana (2018); Beirut Art Center (2017); Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2016); Witte de With, Rotterdam (2016); Kunsthalle Lissabon, Lisbon (2015); and Art in General, New York (2015).

Her work has also been featured in numerous group exhibitions including: Documenta 15 (2022), Mardin biennial (2022), Sydney Biennial film program (2022), 3rd Autostrada Biennale, Pristina (2021); 11th Berlin Biennale (2020); The Renaissance Society, Chicago (2020); Gwangju Biennial (2018); Lülea Biennial (2018); Kunsthalle Wien (2019); 1st Sharjah Architecture Triennial (2019); SF Moma, San Francisco (2019); Warsaw Biennial (2019); 14th Sharjah Biennale (2019); Maxxi Museum, Rome (2017); Ludwig Museum, Cologne (2016); Thessaloniki Biennial (2015); Home Works Forum, Ashkal Alwan, Beirut (2010, 2013, 2015); New Museum, New York (2014); 55th Venice Biennial (2013); M HKA, Antwerp (2013),); the 12th Istanbul Biennial (2011). Her films have been screened at MOMA New York (2023), School of Art Institute Chicago (Gene Siskel Film Center) (2023), Cinéma du Réel, Paris (2021); Rotterdam Film Festival (2021); Film Fest, Hamburg (2020); FID Marseille (2015, 2019, 2022); tiff, Toronto (2019); Berwick Film & Media Arts Festival (2019); Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (2017); Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris (2011, 2017,2022); Berlin International Film Festival (2010, 2015)

Arsanios was a researcher in the Fine Art Department at the Jan Van Eyck Academie, Maastricht (2010–12). She is currently a PhD candidate at the Akademie der bildenden Künste in Vienna.

Choreographer and imagery artist, born, raised and nourished in Brazil, navigating the World through movement making. 

The artist amplifies a research of Afro-Diasporic and Urban dances, works as extemporary dancer and pedagogue, her practices are woven with the act of traveling. Ana Pi constantly investigates gestures that have been passed down through traditions and mutated as they traversed different landscapes and bodies.

Her transdisciplinary works are particularly situated between the notions of transit, displacement, belonging, superposition, memory, colors and ordinary gestures. Her dances, films and research have been programmed in institutional spaces such as Cisneros Institute with MoMA, Raw Material Company, Centre Pompidou, Histórias Afro-Atlânticas Exhibition, Festival d’Automne Paris, among many others.

The Divine Cypher, RAW ON, Fumaça, Meditation on Beauty, èscultura, RACE, O BΔNQUETE, COROA, NoirBLUE, DRW2 et Le Tour du Monde des Danses Urbaines en 10 villes, are her works that articulate choreography, discourse and installation. 

Audiovisual productions are highlighted by NoirBLUE – les déplacements d’une danse (2018 – 27′), filmed in 9 countries of the African Continent, is her first documentary, internationally awarded, and the essays Another Anagram of Ideas (2022) and VÓS (2011). 

Since 2010, she has been developing and sharing the practice named STEADY BODY; peripheral dances, sacred gestures, and in 2020, she creates the structure NA MATA LAB for artistic production and collaboration.

In 2023, commissioned by the 35th São Paulo Biennial - Choreographies of the Impossible, she exhibited her first kinetic installation ANTENA IA MBAMBE – Mimenekenu Ê Lá Tempo!, created in collaboration with Taata Kwa Nkisi Mutá Imê, a supreme priest of the Brazilian Candomblé.  In this project, materials such as ceramics, baobab seeds, a study of the Institut Fondamental d’Afrique Noire photographic archive in Dakar, Senegal, a metal structure, and an animated movie are aligned in the same dance and dialogue with the various dimensions of “Tempo.” Nkisi divinity and vital principle of the “Candomblé” heritage in Brazil unveils all the potential of moving and planting other images.

She signed the choreography of ALGORITHM OCEAN TRUE BLOOD MOVES, the large-scale performance directed by the visual artist and poet Julien Creuzet. Premiered in New York City with Performa Biennial, presented as well at the Nationale Opera Ballet Amsterdam with Hartwig Art Foundation, and in Senegal within Dakar Biennial 2025 special program, completing a significant full-circle journey that symbolically reverses the brutality of the transatlantic slave trade through a new triangulation of life and vitality..

Ana Pi is now working on her next creation, ATOMIC JOY, for 8 dancers to be premiered in 2025, both in Brazil and France.

Feiko Beckers (b. 1983) is a Dutch artist who lives and works in Brussels. He was artist-in-resident at the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam in 2010-2011 and in 2013 at Palais de Tokyo in Paris.

He works with everyday histories based on events from his own life, stories about failures, accidents or embarrassing situations that he has personally experienced. His work seeks answers to the unexpected, merciless character of unfortunate events. With video,performance, installations and even music, he constructs narratives that are unexpectedly interrupted, their determined and unavoidable failure impending and self-evident.

His work has been exhibited at De Appel, Amsterdam; Palais de Tokyo, Paris;Beursschouwburg, Brussel; Tenderpixel, Londen; Museum Kranenburg, Bergen; ; STUK, Leuven; Kunstverein Braunschweig; Fries Museum, Leeuwarden and at Gallery Stigter van Doesburg, Amsterdam.