23.04.26 – 29.05.26, moss collective, Essential Reading #46

Is script meant to be read, or meant to be seen? At what point does handwriting become a gesture, a trace on a surface rather than a vehicle of meaning?

Scriptural Abstraction explores the use of script as a visual language that moves beyond legibility. From sacred calligraphic traditions to modern and contemporary experiments, artists have long examined the tension between writing and drawing. The exhibition turns toward what might be called the shadow side of writing: the visual dimension of script that remains hidden behind its role as language, where writing abandons its communicative function and moves toward texture, movement and the abstract visual form.

This exploration takes place at a moment when writing itself is undergoing a transformation. Writing today is almost invariably produced through keyboards and digital interfaces, while the practice of handwriting continues to decline across much of the Western world. What was once a material, gestural act performed by the hand is increasingly replaced by standardized typographic forms.

Against this background, the works brought together in this selection return to writing as a physical and visual practice. The selected books present words, letters, and calligraphic signs as visual material, loosening the bond between reading and understanding. Writing shifts between script and image as letters dissolve, repeat, or distort. Script turns into pattern and language becomes image. Meaning may disappear, but significance remains.

Houda Ben Azzouz

Houda Ben Azzouz is a Brussels-based visual artist and researcher working across writing, curating, printmaking, photography, and calligraphy. Her practice explores how visual forms shape cultural narratives and how visual languages influence one another across cultures and histories. She is currently following the postgraduate Curatorial Studies at KASK & Conservatorium (2025–2026).

The exhibition Sampler, curated by Kasper Andreasen, is currently on view at the Kunstenbibliotheek in Ghent. The exhibition explores the medium of the artist’s book through a broad selection of student publications, drawn from a recent donation to the library. On the upper floor, 75 publications are presented in three vitrines. In addition, the titles of 26 works appear on walls, floors, and shelves, transforming the space into a landscape of poetic fragments.

On two Tuesday mornings in March, Kasper Andreasen will give an informal tour of the exhibition. He will speak about the selected works and the development of the project, and will also discuss the accompanying publication Sampler, designed in collaboration with alumna Aagje Vandriessche.

Everyone is welcome — you can register via the link below.

The exhibition Sampler, curated by Kasper Andreasen, is currently on view at the Kunstenbibliotheek in Ghent. The exhibition explores the medium of the artist’s book through a broad selection of student publications, drawn from a recent donation to the library. On the upper floor, 75 publications are presented in three vitrines. In addition, the titles of 26 works appear on walls, floors, and shelves, transforming the space into a landscape of poetic fragments.

On two Tuesday mornings in March, Kasper Andreasen will give an informal tour of the exhibition. He will speak about the selected works and the development of the project, and will also discuss the accompanying publication Sampler, designed in collaboration with alumna Aagje Vandriessche.

Everyone is welcome — you can register via the link below.

Drawing on more than a decade of research, Beyond Brutalism and the Postwar Architecture–Sculpture Network explores how artists and architects reimagined the relationship between sculpture, architecture and public space in the decades after the Second World War. Moving beyond Brutalism as a style, the book uncovers a network of collaborations, magazines, and experiments that sought to integrate art into everyday life; from sculptural buildings to artworks encountered in motion and in public space. During this presentation, Angelique Campens reflects on the making of the book and revisits the postwar ambition of a synthèse des arts, the idea that art, architecture, and lived experience can form a shared environment

Angelique Campens is an art and architecture historian, curator, and writer whose work reshapes how we understand the intersections of sculpture and architecture, monumental public sculpture and sculptural concrete. Campens previously published works on Juliaan Lampens, Jacques Moeschal and André Bloc. She holds a PhD in Art sciences at Ghent University, teaches at KASK & Conservatorium and serves as Review Editor for Public Art Dialogue.

The book will not be for sale on the event. More information on the publication here.

Fugitive Pages began as a gesture anchored in Black History Month. As the artists’ book collection was explored, a rupture emerged: out of nearly two thousand books, only five could be identified as authored by African-descendant artists. What began as a necessity became a site of transformation. With the support of the Kunstenbibliotheek, 1M³ expands beyond the existing collection, welcoming books already present alongside new commissions intended to enter it, not as symbolic corrections, but as required gestures. 

Guided by the thought of Fred Moten and Stefano Harney, this cubic metre operates as a site of fugitive planning: a space that inhabits the academy without fully belonging to it. Moving quietly through its gaps and constraints, it cultivates forms of study, care, and connection that resist, expand, and seek to do better, working within institutional power without seeking its recognition. 

Within the space, these shelves function as a parallel network for learning, circulation, and knowledgemaking. The books are not silent; they carry weight, absence, and the promise of continuity. At the centre sits a measured void: a shelf holding exactly the number of books initially present, rendering a glass ceiling visible and making countable the invisible barriers that shape the limits of recognition, authorship, and institutional space. 

Across the vitrine, voices converge – diasporic, African, American, British, Francophone – entering into dialogue. The book becomes a site of circulation, a place where histories meet without hierarchy. 

Visitors are invited to leave traces: names, references, absences still felt within the institution. Each note gestures toward future acquisitions, toward presence yet to come. 

This vitrine does not claim completeness. It insists on attention, on making absence felt, on building a library that listens, shifts, and grows in relation — a space of care, reflection, and collective possibility.

Charlotte Frenay

Charlotte Frenay is a Brussels-based researcher working on alternative archival practices. She holds a BA in Media and Communications from Goldsmiths, University of London, and later completed an MA in African Studies at Ghent University. She is currently enrolled in the postgraduate Curatorial Studies at KASK & Conservatorium for 2025–2026.

How can we make light a fully-fledged and equal contributor within contemporary dramaturgy? Reflecting Light is a research project by various lighting designers who are literally shining the spotlight on the use of light in the performing arts. With the support of KASK & Conservatorium and arts centre BUDA, they have been shaping a discourse on lighting design for four years now, and are trying to share this knowledge – formally and informally – through fanzines and residencies, among other things.

The project grouped lighting designers Emese Csornai, Ezra Veldhuis, Henri Emmanuel Doublier, Jan Fedinger, Jan Maertens and Tomi Humalisto - and collaborated with Bruno Pocheron, Estelle Gautier, Ingunn Fjellang Sæther, Leticia Skrycky, Maureen Beguin, Meri Ekola, Minna Tiikkainen, Pernille Plantener Holst and Materia Leve.

To conclude this part of the project, Reflecting Light uses the darkness of the longest nights to host two nights of lectures, presentations and installations on light and lighting design.

Reflecting Light, Kunstenbibliotheek

Several artists raise questions from within the collected Reflecting Light fanzines - in a programme with collective readings, talks, performative interventions, the presentation of a new platform and some installations. With a.o. Materia Leve, Judith Dhondt, Amelia Malfait Lakhtara & the lighting designers from Reflecting Light.

Geert Belpaeme is affiliated as an artistic researcher to KASK & Conservatorium, the school of arts of HOGENT and howest. The research project Reflecting Light was financed by the HOGENT Arts Research Fund.

Inspired by Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own, this 1M³ space transforms the notion of creative space into one of collective visibility. A bookshelf is personal yet a place of prestige, carrying cultural weight and authority. Within this space, women’s voices take their place in public view. Together, they remind us that both knowledge and space must be continuously reimagined and reclaimed. In the context of a bookshelf, fiction represents the imaginative dimension of knowledge, the realm of what could be. Over time, the bookshelf shifts and reshapes itself. What is visible and what is concealed remain in constant conversation. The shelf becomes a living archive of thought, curiosity, and care. 

Eline Adriaensen is an architect based in Antwerp and Ghent. She holds a Master’s degree in Architecture from the University of Antwerp, complemented by an exchange program at the Umeå School of Architecture in Sweden. 

At the moment, she is participating in the curatorial studies postgraduate programme at KASK & Conservatorium.

Retour displays drawings of train journeys between Belgium and the Netherlands, with hand-drawn typography and interiors that subtly highlight cultural differences. The centre page marks the border.

On Thursday 13 November 2025, at 19:00, the exhibition will open with a performance by Eva van Bemmelen & Maxim Preaux and the book presentation of Retour.

For the sixth year in a row, you are invited to Bijloke Wonderland, a summer cultural festival from Thursday 21 to Sunday 31 August at the bustling Bijloke site in Ghent. Expect tantalising sunrise concerts, free summer bar concerts, theatre, dance, visual arts & tours. Discover special locations on the Bijlokesite and get carried away by a programme for young and old. This year, for the first time, there will be a continuous programme for 11 consecutive days.

KASK & Conservatorium presents music and visual art by students on the open lawn of the Bijlokesite. Six diverse installations form a temporary landscape, culminating in a musical intervention. KIOSK serves up a performance. The Kunstenbibliotheek organises a zine festival and presents a selection from their zine collection.

The programme is presented by organisations at home on the Bijloke site: Muziekcentrum De Bijloke, LOD muziektheater, STAM, laGeste, Ontroerend Goed and KASK & Conservatorium (HOGENT-Howest).

ongoing

• Kunstenbibliotheek & Shif—t*, Summershelves #2
• Aagje Vandriessche, Capteren
• Vicente Fuenzalida Lafourcade, Floating Garden
• Jean Paul Simons, In de zomer van 2017 werkte Jean Paul Simons enkele maanden
• Michiel Vindevogel, Oculus
• Gill Slosse, Remaining Shadows
• Layla Morando, When Doves Cry

Thu 21.08.25

• Kunstenbibliotheek, Zine-festival, 15:00

Sat 23.08.25

• Leen Van Tichelen, Fanny Vandesande, Jonas Bruyneel & Esther Coorevits, GROUND ZERO /51.04536/3.71609

Sat 30.08.25

• SONduo, Zomermiddagdroom Konzert, 16:00

Sun 31.08.25

• SONduo, Zomermiddagdroom Konzert, 14:30

Students from KASK & Conservatorium are organising a zine festival in collaboration with the Kunstenbibliotheek. At the same time, you can discover a presentation by artist collective Shif—t* in the cellarium.

Assembled by Louis Gahide, with zines by: Anna Van der Vurst, Riwan Kallel, Vero Denecker, Riet Van Lysebettens, Méraud Verschuere, Ling Madelein, Lena Moreels, Otis Monteny, Amber Goossens, Adriel Cantamessi, Margo van Damme, Julia Butter, Lex Monteny, Paulien Van Loo, Emma Durant, Marinela Demaj, Inès De Laender, Dominica De Rieck, Anne Dekeyser, Ines Claus, Arthur De Boever, Migena Demaj, Dominique De Groen, Carmen van der Straten, Nava Asgari, Layla Morando and Aagje Vandriessche.

The zine festival opens on the first day of Bijloke Wonderland, a cultural summer festival from Thursday 21 to Sunday 31 August at the vibrant Bijloke site in Ghent. View the full programme.