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.