Marijke De Roover, KASKlezing, 08.02.24

The evening starts with an online lecture by Lichen Hamraie, followed by a conversation together with Leni Van Goidsenhoven. Afterwards there will be interventions by Staci Bu Shea and Carly Everaert, ending with an aftertalk.

Accessibility is often understood as a way to correct built environments not designed with disability in mind. In this talk, Dr. Lichen Hamraie, Canada Research Chair in Technology, Society, and Disability, will will instead explore the broader meanings and practices of access in the twentieth and twenty-first century architecture, design, and disability arts. The talk will focus on four themes: assimilation and anti-assimilation, productivity and anti-productivity, normalization and critique, and the new vocabularies of critical access.

Considering how we can be transformed through giving and receiving care, curator, writer and careworker Staci Bu Shea will reflect on vulnerability and its implications for connection and dignity across interpersonal and institutional domains.

Award-winning costume designer and dramaturgical scenographer Carly Everaert’s presentation will trace how creating spaces for other(ed) bodies — and radically rethinking what a learning space can be — opened the way for their long-term collaboration with Mira Thompson: “Interdependence: On Disability Justice and the (Performing) Arts”. Together, they developed a practice in which co-creation is lived interdependence, crip time is a generative force, and artistic freedom can flourish. This led Carly to altarscenography: theorising how care, attention and solidarity create sacred spaces, where aesthetics and ethics meet as the spiritual foundation for solidarity itself.

About the speakers

• Lichen Hamraie is the Canada Research Chair in Technology, Society, and Disability, and Associate Professor of Social Science at York University. Hamraie’s research on disability and design has helped form the fields of critical access studies and crip technoscience. They are the director of the Critical Design Lab. Hamraie is author of ‘Building Access: Universal Design and the Politics of Disability’ (2017) and host of the Contra* podcast on disability and design. They are a 2022 United States Artists Fellow and Member of the U.S. Access Board.

• Staci Bu Shea is a curator, writer, educator and careworker based in Utrecht, the Netherlands. Broadly, Bu Shea convenes with others over aesthetic, critical, and poetic practices of social reproduction and care work, as well as its manifestations in interpersonal relationships, daily life, community organizing, and institutional practices. Bu Shea is the author of Dying Livingly (Solution series, Sternberg Press, 2025). Bu Shea was curator at Casco Art Institute of Working for the Commons (Utrecht, 2017–2022) and co-curator of Barbara Hammer: Evidentiary Bodies at Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art (New York, 2017). Bu Shea holds an MA from the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College (Annandale-on-Hudson, 2016).

• – Carly Everaert is an award-winning costume designer and dramaturgical scenographer. As a lecturer and researcher at the Academy of Theater and Dance in Amsterdam, Carly explores costume, bodies, and sustainability from an intersectional perspective. Their practice is becoming increasingly rooted in the principles of Disability Justice, making diverse abilities, knowledge, and ways of moving more visible. Carly collaborates with artists, curators, educators, and scholars who prioritize embodied knowledge. Carly’s methodology combines critical reflection with material experiments—where making is viewed as a form of thinking. Carly is chair of the jury for the Dutch Theater Festival’s Design Award. Their essay ‘Altarscenography, disability justice and staging coincidence, a secular-spiritual practice of solidarity, on solidarity, coincidence, and shared vulnerability as scenographic practice’ will be published in August 2026.

• Leni Van Goidsenhoven is Assistant Professor of Critical Disability Studies at the Department of Literary and Cultural Analysis at the University of Amsterdam (The Netherlands). Her research focuses on disability, illness, neurodiversity, and non-normative bodyminds in the arts and literature. She is the author of Autisme in veelvoud (Garant, 2020) and OnGehoord (EPO, 2021). Her recent work includes the special issue Cripping Choreography and the forthcoming volume Disability Heritage: Participatory and Transformative Engagement (co-edited with Manon Parry, Routledge). Alongside her academic work, she regularly curates projects for theatres and museums.

This programme is a collaboration between Curatorial Studies, KASKlectures and Studium Generale Gent. The event will be in English and will take place in the Zwarte Zaal of KASK & Conservatorium. The Zwarte Zaal is located on the ground floor and is accessible to wheelchair users, there’s also an accessible toilet in the hallway of KASKcafé. In case you use a wheelchair, go via the entrance of KASKcinema instead of the Louis Pasteurlaan entrance. There are works in the street of KASKcinema, but it’s possible to pass by the entrance at Godshuizenlaan 4. A translation into Flemish sign language will be provided. If you have any further questions about accessibility facilities, please contact the organisation: helena.verheye@hogent.be

On Thursday, October 1, we celebrate the launch of De Spijtige Herder3, a magazine devoted to art and poetry, edited by Gerard Herman, Nel Aerts, Jan Op de Beeck, Arne Bastien and Vincent Geyskens.

This third issue features:

• An exclusive interview with Hans Werner Poschauko—Maria Lassnig’s personal assistant and confidant—about working and living with the artist.
• A series of drawings by Jolijn Baeckelandt.
• A number of texts exploring the place of painting in the contemporary art world. These texts emerged from HAND & HORIZON, a “seminar on painting” that we organised at KASK in March of this year. Students and lecturers from Leipzig, Malmö, Helsinki and KASK Ghent came together to give lectures and discuss painting (see the table of contents attached).
• A recent self-portrait by Vincent Geyskens, reproduced as an unnumbered screen print on the back cover.

During the launch evening, poetry will be read by:

Brunhilde Von Braun
Veva Leye
Vincent Geyskens
…

There will also be live music.

het balanseer presents Het kwaad by Frank Vande Veire:

We live in strange times. We accuse one another of racism, sexism, fascism, self-enrichment, indifference... On the internet and in the press, insinuations and condemnations rain down, as if we were taking part in a contest in which we try to outdo one another in moral outrage. At the same time, there is rarely any talk of evil, and even less of ‘sin’. These concepts are dismissed as outdated, overly religious or metaphysically charged, remnants of a pernicious Judeo-Christian legacy. In his werpsels, Frank Vande Veire breathes new life into these concepts. He turns his attention to the evil that rages in the world and within ourselves, prompted by a philosophical or literary text, a news report, a documentary, or a personal experience. He delves into the depths of our envy, (self-)hatred, resentment... Human beings torment others because they are tormentors of themselves.

About Frank Vande Veire

Frank Vande Veire has previously published the novels Bloeiende Agatha (2013) and Het einde van alle straten (2022) with de balanseer. He has also written philosophical essays on art, literature, and social phenomena: Als in een donkere spiegel. De kunst in de moderne filosofie(2003), Neem en eet, dit is je lichaam (2005), and Tussen blinde fascinatie en vrijheid. Het mensbeeld van Slavoj Zizek (2015).

Throughout July and August, Ommery De Zutter inhabited KIOSK as artist in residence. While KIOSK remained closed to the public during the summer, Ommery De Zutter, used the anatomical theater as a map for creating an immersive VR experience. 

Ommery De Zutter’s exhibition de Wereldgeest, resulting from this residency, opens on 12 September and will be on view until 4 October.

What happens when creationbecomes materially endless?

When skills as a means of creation begin to play a secondary role? 

How would expression unfold then?

In what way would it be different? 

Is it valid?

Does it remain valid when it continues to be about itself?

Or does creation then become too entangled in itself?

And if that is the case, why shouldn’t it simply be allowed to

When does creation become useful to the Other?

Isn’t creation emerging from creation itself precisely creation?

Does it make sense to investigate the same idea from emptiness when someone has already taken it up from an established position?

Can we accept it when creation is no longer intended for us? 

Where does the balance with the Other lie during creation? 

Is the imbalance of time and energy with the Other not precisely what is necessary for creation?

Are we also the Other? Are we without the Other?

Does thinking about creation and the Other disrupt the existing balance?

Isn’t it simply obvious that the next forms of creation will move beyond our own abstraction, emerging from semantic-geometric constructions that surpass our own understanding and give rise to new realities?

Drawing from seemingly endlessly proliferating word sequences—which arise from a single word through a simple rule and through association—Veva Leye creates montages that present the same words in completely different ways. Uncannily coagulating, these word images expand and contract in an accordion-like movement. A similar rhythm characterizes Jelle Martens’ (photo)graphic registrations that combine fragments, reproductions and trivial observations into layered prints and drawings. Every print layer, every drawing operates as a temporary frame bringing together images that only temporarily solidify, overlap, and fall apart again. Image and language tumble along, stumble upon. Letters form words form images reading looking.

For the finissage of Hisae Ikenaga’s solo exhibition Anatomies of Use, Céline Vahsen presents a sound performance in which gestures visibly and physically cause the acoustic landscape.

Through repetitive and manufacturing gestures, industrial materials resonate and bring manual labour into rhythm. Vahsen will also use pottery made by her aunt: utilitarian objects that reconnect her with the past.

Her aunt worked in a ceramic and glass manufacturing company that later became her own, until the late 1990s, when open trade and capitalism contributed to the decline of smaller industries. Playing with vessels, plates and bowls — first functional, then obsessive, then ceremonial — Vahsen transforms everyday objects into resonant instruments carrying personal, social and industrial histories.

Some elements of the choreography are part of a collaborative practice she started in 2025 with percussionist Aya Suzuki.

An unconventional choir performance by a group of FLINTA*-people investigating the relationship they have to their voice. Together they welcome vulnerability through whispers, stutters and echoes, while also showcasing the power of a collective voice in resisting patriarchal norms. This performance grew out of the master project Exploring a Feminist Voice by Anne Rosa Lut.

The performance is organized on the occasion of the last day of Hisae Ikenaga's solo exhibition Anatomies of Use.

Performers
Anne Rosa Lut, Imme van Zuilekom, Kika Vens, Elvira Mahieu, Kim Heerkens, Sofie Vanderbauwhede, Vera Goldhoorn, Elfine Radwanski, Hriedt Van Biervliet.

Due to visa issues, this KASK lecture has been cancelled.

Julian Abraham "Togar" is a drummer and visual artist whose practice flows with visual art, sonic practice and experimental filmmaking. Togar's practice often focuses on the demystification and dissemination of specialist scientific knowledge to broader communities through sound, installations and collaborative practices.

Togar's works have been presented at the 17th Istanbul Biennial; 15th Gwangju Biennale; 13th Taipei Biennale; 58th Carnegie International (Pittsburgh); and in public institutions and museums such as De Appel (Amsterdam), KHOJ (New Delhi), SculptureCenter (New York), Nottingham Contemporary and Cemeti (Yogyakarta), among others.

Trinkets, strings, handmade kits and stones that sing: the songs of activated non-instruments will fill the reverberant expanse of Ghent's Kiosk for a double bill that straddles the fringe between concert and installation. Maryia Kamarova's propelling sculptures meet Mosquito Farm's mishmash of structured chaos, all against the backdrop of Hisae Ikenaga's uncanny archeologies in KIOSK's ongoing exhibition, Anatomies of Use, to counter the cross-disciplinary dissonances.

Maryia Kamarova
A sound universe constructed from fragments of nature and treasures of the everyday ~ Belarusian artist Marya Komarova creates spatial settings somewhere along the border of sound installation and meditative performance. Her electro-acoustic gizmos and environmental compositions come alive under her actions and inertias, taking their own destinies into uncharted aural territories and inhabiting spaces as intently as the spectators who fall under their spell.

Mosquito Farm
Two years after their appearance at KRAAK Fest, Maddie Banwell and Grace Black return with Mosquito Farm to show the evolution of their musical contraptions. Bowed metal wobbles, tin cans rumble, fans whir and swirl, and improvised percussion setups drill a beat into action as radio transmissions feed the drone. Perhaps something resembling a guitar or a wind-up hamster might make an appearance ~ anything's a possible player in this hypnotic orchestra of happenstance.

For her first solo exhibition in Belgium, Hisae Ikenaga presents a selection of existing and new works. The title Anatomies of Use refers to the subtle displacements that structure her practice: shifts of function, status, and meaning. Industrial and domestic objects are appropriated and reconfigured, their use suspended, their familiarity unsettled. Forms appear stabilized, as if halted after transformation, revealing tensions between use, form, and memory.

Ceramic works extend this reflection through the figure of the cylinder, borrowed from industrial lamination tools and transposed into pottery. The motif becomes form, matrix, and trace of gesture. In a new video in collaboration with film director Paula Onet, Soft Dissection, artisanal and medical gestures intersect, opening an ambiguous space between workshop and laboratory. Through these displacements — from tool to object, from gesture to image — Ikenaga constructs an archaeology of the present, where each form becomes trace, sculpture, and question.

About Hisae Ikenaga

Born in Mexico City in 1977 to a family of Japanese origin, based in Europe for more than twenty years and currently living in Luxembourg, Hisae Ikenaga has developed an artistic language that unfolds at the intersection of design, archaeology, and surrealism. She studied art theory and visual arts in Mexico, Kyoto, Barcelona, and Madrid. Her work reveals a fascination with the afterlife of manufactured objects: their programmed obsolescence, their capacity for transformation, and their potential to host new forms of life. Each sculpture embodies a tension between the industrial and the handmade, between the cold logic of production and the fragile warmth of the human hand.

Support

The exhibition at KIOSK is co-curated by Charlotte Masse, curator and Head of Exhibitions at Konschthal Esch, who organized Ikenaga’s major solo exhibition Phantom Limbs in 2024.

Hisae Ikenaga received the generous support of the Fondation Schleich-Lentz for the production of a new series of ceramic works for the exhibition at KIOSK.

With the support of Kultur | lx – Arts Council Luxembourg.

Miko Revereza is a filmmaker born in Manila, Philippines, who currently lives in Oaxaca, Mexico. His upbringing as an undocumented immigrant and his current exile from the United States have shaped his relationship with moving images.

During the next edition of the Courtisane festival, Miko Revereza will visit Ghent and present several films and a performance. In No Data Plan, he uses the resources immediately at his disposal—his camera, his smartphone, his nomadic existence, and his unique perspective as a stranger in a strange land—to construct an evocative meditation on home and homeland. After his decision to leave the United States, he charted his return to the Philippines in Distancing using superimpositions of intimate 16mm images of the airport, his home, and his family. The performance FOLDS is a film poem consisting of a series of superimpositions/double exposures and a live soundtrack. Just like a folded map, distances are collapsed and placed opposite each other. By superimposing years of images of portraits of people and places, the separation between borders disappears.

In this KASK lecture, Miko Revereza talks about his work and the impact of exile and boundaries on his oeuvre.

“It’s complicated to call any place home. Mexico is a place that’s not my home as it is for other people who have lived here for generations. Every place I live, it’s hard to connect to as home, like the US and the Phillippines, but I also feel like there’s so much weight to the word “home,” and it doesn’t need to be such a priority.”

Sensitive to contemporary issues, Gaëlle Choisne’s practice considers the complexity of the world, its political and cultural disorder, whether it be the over-exploitation of nature, its resources, or the vestiges of colonial history, where Creole esoteric traditions, myths and popular cultures mingle.

Her projects are conceived as ecosystems of sharing and collaboration, pockets of «resistance» where new possibilities are created, notably with the «Temple of Love» project. Initiated from Roland Barthes’ original essay on love, «Fragments d’un discours amoureux» (1977), Gaëlle Choisne adds a political dimension to the concept of love by paying homage to invisible bodies, minority and fragile souls, and dispossessed hearts. «Temple of love » is an evolutionary project defining itself through its modes of appearance and genesis according to its invitations and its location.

The works/installations of Gaëlle Choisne have been exhibited in many institutions: (Vitry-sur-Seine), Centrale Powerhouse (Montreal), CAFA Museum (Beijing), Pera Museum (Istanbul), MAM - Musée d’art moderne de Paris, Musée Fabre (Montpellier), Zacheta Gallery (Warsaw), The Mistake Room (Los Angeles), Bétonsalon (Paris), Gr-und project space (Berlin), MAMO - Centre d’art de la Cité radieuse de Marseille, La Villette x Pompidou (Paris), Centre d’art contemporain La Halle des bouchers (Vienne), Musée archéologique Henri-Prade (Lattes), Musée des Beaux-Arts de Lyon etc.

She has also participated in several biennials and triennials: 15th Gwandju Biennial (2024), 3rd Toronto Biennial of Art (2024), 5th New Museum Triennial (2021), 11th International Biennial of Contemporary Art (GIBCA), 13th International Biennial of Lyon (2015), 12th Havana Biennial (2015), Sharjah Biennial 13 (2017) and 14th Curitiba Biennial (2017).

In 2024, Gaëlle Choisne won the Marcel Duchamp Prize and, in 2021, the AWARE Prize. In 2019 she is nominated for the Ricard Foundation Prize and the Sam Art Project.

Andrius Arutiunian is an Armenian-Lithuanian artist and composer based between The Hague and Paris. Working across installation, sound, and sculpture, Arutiunian's practice explores hybrid forms of listening, vernacular knowledges, and contemporary cosmologies.

In 2022, Arutiunian represented Armenia at the 59th Venice Biennale. Solo presentations include Fondation d'entreprise Hermès (Tokyo, 2026), Dat Bolwerck (Zutphen, 2025), and Meduza (Vilnius, 2023). Arutiunian has participated in biennials including the 14th Shanghai Biennale, 15th Gwangju Biennale, 17th Lyon Biennale, 15th Baltic Triennial, and Performa NYC, with group exhibitions at Centre Pompidou, Palais de Tokyo, M HKA, Kadist Paris, and Pinchuk Art Centre, among others. In 2024, he was shortlisted for the Future Generation Art Prize and was a DAAD artist-in-residence fellow in 2023.

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.

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.

In my never-ending search for other ways of looking and other ways of making images and presenting film, the explorative realm of cinema is full of adventure.

The way we see the world is influenced by what we know or what we believe in. There are many possible perspectives from which to look at a thing, a landscape, a person, a story, yourself. Unfortunately, we poor myopic humans lack the gift of birds of prey, with their long-range sight, and the talents of houseflies, with their panoramic vision. Through our large brains, however, we are at least aware of the limits of our seeing. With a humility rare in our species, we acknowledge that there is much we cannot see and therefore devise ways to observe the world.

It is difficult to look and to see at the same time. Only genuine attention is able to rival the most powerful magnifying lens. If you look long enough at what seems ordinary, it often becomes strange and unfamiliar, as every child learns when they repeatedly say their own name out loud. If our looking is limited to our eyes, we are seeing blind. When our field of vision is not demarcated by an edge, but presents itself as an infinitely explorable openness, the world breaks open.

In this lecture, we approach film in an adventurous way. How can a film be made in which the camera does not mimic the human eye? How can a film be made that is not based on the ordinary way humans see the world? How can a film be experienced when there are no images to see? How can cinema become an adventure? Using films and film clips, we try to answer these questions in the freest way possible.

Anouk De Clerq

Anouk De Clercq is a multidisciplinary artist and filmmaker who explores the boundaries of cinema, music and spatiality. With a background in music and film, she creates immersive audiovisual experiences that challenge traditional narratives and perceptions. Her work often focuses on imaginary and utopian landscapes, brought to life through a combination of digital techniques and analogue sensitivity.

Her work has been shown internationally at venues including BOZAR, Centre Pompidou, MAXXI, CAC Vilnius and Tate Modern, and is part of several collections. De Clercq is co-founder of Auguste Orts and initiator of Monokino, mentor to emerging artists and author of Where is Cinema. She is also affiliated with KASK & Conservatorium as a visiting teacher.

Graphic designers Elisabeth Rafstedt and Johanna Ehde are Rietlanden Women’s Office (2018, Rietlanden in Amsterdam). They are interested in current and historical methods of collaborative graphic design. Together they make the publication series MsHeresies which is about the ornamental in feminist collaboration. They give lectures and guest teach in book design and typography at various institutions around Europe, and together with Phil Baber of The Last Books they organise the poetry reading series Don’t Pay Your Rent.

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.

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).

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.