19.11.26 – 10.12.26, Pages Between Spaces, Artists books as extensions of artistic practice

Whilst working on his final major project, Livre d’image, Godard decided that the ideal place and way to watch this film was in his own studio. It is now possible to visit his workplace, albeit relocated to Milan at the Fondazione Prada. Even after his death, the film itself continues to tour and be screened as an installation. To evoke the atmosphere of the studio, the screening space is scented with cigars from his favourite brand.

In the Zwarte Zaal, Fabrice Aragno presents Sentiments, Signes, Passions, a dynamic projection of Jean-Luc Godard’s final film Le livre d’image (2018). Out of deep respect for his mentor, Aragno travels the world, each time presenting a different version of the installation. This time, he captures Godard’s personal workspace: Et la nuit le jour. This can be seen in the cellarium of the Kunstenbibliotheek.

This selection of volumes invites the audience to transcend a passive contemplation in favor of an embodied engagement, where the artwork is fully completed only through the subject’s interaction. Rooted in the movements of Constructivism, Kinetic and Programmed Art, these artworks are conceived as exemplaires de recherche that replace the artist’s subjective expression with a rational and experimental methodology. The exploration of light, movement and rhythm is central to this approach as these variables extend the static object into space through sensory activation.

Drawing upon Umberto Eco’s theory of the Open Work, each project presents itself as a field of infinite perceptual possibilities, governed by a dialectic between chance and program. The visitor’s physical displacement activates the artwork’s system, transforming the gaze into a critical act. Within this curation, the selection ranges from the GRAV group—featuring the systematic grids of François Morellet and the interactive works of Julio Le Parc and Francisco Sobrino—to the Belgian artist Marc Verstockt’s tridimensional structures and the colorful Plexiglas pages of Paul Ibou. We invite you to engage with these pages, where the user ceases to be a spectator to become a co-producer.

Alice Zitelli is a curator and researcher based in Belgium. Her work focuses on exhibition history and postwar neo-avant-garde movements, with a particular interest in curatorial practices as forms of research. She holds a BA in Art History and an MA in Economics and Management of Arts from Ca’ Foscari University in Venice.

Samira Alirezabeigi is a researcher based in Brussels. Her research focuses on the intersection between artistic practice, science and technology and pedagogical forms. She holds a PhD in educational sciences from KU Leuven.

Alice and Samira are both currently following the postgraduate Curatorial Studies at KASK & Conservatorium (2025–2026).

Lotte Egtberts, Elisa Maupas, Lucie Ménard and Anna Stoppa collaborate as a curatorial collective under the name moss since 2020. Strengthened by the complementarity of their profiles (artist, scientist, mediator, and art historian) and their various professional experiences (galleries, institutions, artist-run spaces in France, Belgium, Italy, United Kingdom, and the Netherlands), moss approaches vulnerability, mutual support and shared learning as cultural work, organically prioritizing horizontal collaboration with artists. Their curatorial practice becomes a playground for conversation and experimentation, where different forms of knowledge and embodiment can coexist.

Essential Reading

Essential Reading is a project that aims to enlarge, diversify and enrich Kunstenbibliotheek’s book collection. Which books are, today, really indispensible for an art library? Guests of Essential Reading bring together and present in the library the books they consider most valuable in their life and work.

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.