Sampler invites visitors to encounter student publications produced between 2000–2024, as both material objects and fragments of language, showing the intersections between fine art, graphic design, literature, and spatial installation.

Conceived as an exhibition at the Kunstenbibliotheek in Ghent, the project will be on view over the course of a year within the library’s spaces. Across walls, floors, and shelves, the titles of twenty-six works are set down as textual interventions, transforming the interior into a landscape of poetic fragments. This constellation is complemented by a broader selection of publications – a recent donation to the library which is presented in vitrines on the second floor.

To activate the archive of the publications, a magazine is published as a copy- style facsimile, designed in collaboration with Aagje Vandriessche. The project’s execution is based on a concept and a curation by Kasper Andreasen, who also donated the books to the library. The publication Sampler is available at the reception of the Kunstenbibliotheek.

With exhibited titles by Janek Bersz, Kato Bouckaert, Tim Bruggeman, Floor Crick, Lucie De Almeinda Cachinho, Bart De Baets, Joris De Rycke, Martijn den Ouden, Ankje Frouws, Julia Grame, Louis Hilson, Leon Jespers, Mara Joustra, Louise Moana Kolff, Lewie Landuyt, Steve Michiels, Willem Roose, Anne-Sofie Thomsen, Aagje Vandriessche, Jelena Vanoverbeek, Matthieu Vrijman, Bart Walraeve, Floor Wesseling, Felix Ysenbaert, as well as some anonymous authors and other student publications from the Kunstenbibliotheek.

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).

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.

An unusual sight at the Bijloke site: for the first time, a 16-metre-long humpback whale has washed ashore. With an official unveiling on 23 April, Wim Opbrouck welcomes the “Wij zijn de walvis” project to Ghent.

You may have spotted the whale before at Pukkelpop, in Ostend or Kortrijk, but now it’s Ghent’s turn. ‘Wij zijn de walvis’ is an art and awareness-raising project. The beached whale symbolises universal vulnerability – not just that of whales and nature, but of ourselves as well.

This Ghent edition is a collaboration between the Institute for Research into the Enchantment of the Seas (IOBZ), the City of Ghent, Ghent University, Artevelde University College, HOGENT, Bijlokesite and Buren van de Abdij.

In a world that is spinning ever faster, many are left behind. People facing vulnerability – whether due to mental, social or physical challenges – often struggle to feel seen and connected.

Through this project, we aim to create space for vulnerabilities, make the issues surrounding them open for discussion, and focus on connection and resilience. This will result in a whole series of activities in which residents of Ghent, students and care workers paint together, make music, share stories and much more.

RANDVOORWAARDE is a collaboration between Margaux De Pauw and Charlotte Bracke.

Together, they explore the role of fire extinguishers within an exhibition space and how they can relate to paintings without being perceived as a distraction. Rather than ignoring the fire extinguisher, Charlotte aims to draw attention to it. We are all familiar with the accompanying pictograms, but they often disappear from view until danger threatens.

In this exhibition, they bring the fire extinguisher, pictogram and painting together. What is normally ignored becomes a playful interaction here. For perhaps the fire extinguisher is the most successful object in the art world: it hangs in every museum.