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.

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.

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.

Exhibition Opening on Saturday 25 April, from 2 to 6 p.m., with a conversation between Benny Nemer and Malmö-based curator Albin Hillervik at 4 p.m.

Opening hours exhibition: Friday and Sunday, from 1 to 5 p.m., or by appointment.

“Dear Hervé, I visited your library. Christine let me see it; she has kept your books in her home near the Parc Montsouris since you died. My friend Nathanaël, who translated your diaries into English, put us in contact. Perhaps you already know all about it."
Several Favourable Bodies traces the serpentine contours of Benny Nemer’s artistic research into a mysterious collection of picture postcards. The project was set in motion during an encounter with the library of the French photographer and writer Hervé Guibert, conserved in the Paris home of his executor since his 1991 death from AIDS. With the help of bouquets, audio letters, and a vast arrangement of postcards, Nemer tells a story of generational rupture and bonds of queer kinship forged in the long shadow cast by the AIDS crisis.

At the exhibition finissage on Saturday, 30 May, there will be a book launch of Benny Nemer's latest publication, Quelques Corps Favorables: Une carte postale à Hervé Guibert, with a conversation between Benny Nemer, Paris-based photographer Hervé Bossy, and curator Jana Johanna Haeckel at 4 p.m.

Several Favourable Bodies was made possible with the support of KASK & Conservatorium, the school of arts of HOGENT and Howest. It is part of Benny Nemer's research project Several Favourable Bodies: Hervé Guibert's Postcards as Agents of Queer Kinship, financed by the HOGENT Arts Research Fund.

Benny Nemer is a Montreal-born artist, diarist, and researcher based in Paris. He is the grandchild of Quebec potter Rosalie Namer (1925–2006), whose artistic kinship instilled in him an early aesthetic sensibility that included an appreciation of objects, a practice of epistolary writing, and a sympathy with flowers. His multidisciplinary practice often traces the affective contours of love and longing while facilitating bonds of kinship between his audience, figures from history, and himself, taking form through audio work, performance, participatory actions, epistolary writing, and flower arranging. Benny Nemer is currently a postdoctoral researcher at KASK & Conservatorium, where he is pursuing research into queer kinship, postcards as an artistic medium, and the archive of French author and photographer Hervé Guibert.

"Gossips & Ghosts" is the first chapter of an audiovisual project by Rebecca Jane Arthur that brings together women in a collective reading circle and celebrates citation as feminist memory. Filmed on 16mm, the work weaves together voices, fragmented readings, and gestures. It unfolds through voicing, citing, listening, and gathering – acts that resist isolation and build a collective feminist memory.

Drawing on the writings of Silvia Federici, the project revisits how “gossip” – once meaning close friend or companion – was transformed into a term of ridicule, historically contributing to the erosion of female solidarity. In response, Arthur gathers voices reading feminist theory on silence, storytelling, and resistance, foregrounding the sharing of knowledge as a form of collective power and reclaiming “gossip” as a form of feminist kinship.

Gossips & Ghosts features Kedist Coppejans, Kim Eldarova, Amber Erbezci, Muireann Hillman Allen, Lente IJsendijk, Hana Kiani, Marie Logie, Sofia Roelants, Eva De Vilder, Eowyn Vlaeminck, and the hands and humming of Nina Turina and Céline Sola. It is accompanied by a text by curator Sonia D’Alto.

Gossips & Ghosts is made possible with the support from elephy, the Flemish Community Commission (VGC), KASK & Conservatorium / School of Arts Gent, de Kunstenbibliotheek, and WIELS.