The new NW is inaugurated with the opening exhibition Ritual in Transfigured Time, named after the 1946 short film of the same name by Maya Deren (Kiev, 1917–New York, 1961). Deren, whose life was driven by a desire for freedom, was a guiding light for us in devising the exhibition and film programme, as well as the principles of our revitalised organisation: dialogue, collaboration, experiment and the breaking down of boundaries. Many of life’s changes are accompanied by rituals. Rituals help us to navigate liminal phases, the moments between two positions or roles. At the momentary threshold between the old and new NW, we celebrate this radical metamorphosis. Here, in this place, we invite artists to scrutinise, face up to and recreate realities, whether through enchantment or resistance. For Deren, transformation meant treading both paths: dance as poetic self-expression and as a form of liberation. The exhibition opens with Deren’s 16mm film Ritual in Transfigured Time. The film is a ‘documentary of the inner self’, as the artist herself described it. In Deren’s view, ritual dance brought about a ‘depersonalisation’, where the dancer, supported by the community, could be liberated from social and cultural limitations. In this work, the dancing body assumes the space to experience suppressed freedoms once more without limit, to escape from the oppression of the everyday.

Gaëlle Choisne presents a tear-shaped stage and a film made together with dancer Kettly Noël and guitarist Daniele Morelli following the principles of improvisation and transfiguration. Carlotta Bailly-Borg presents an installation with sandblasted glass doors referring to the notion of the momentary threshold, as well as a series of paintings of timeless, forward- flowing figures. Onyeka Igwe interweaves colonial archive footage with her own visual language in an attempt to reclaim Black dance from the colonial project. Ula Sickle explores the concept of a ‘cinematic camera’ in recordings of dance rehearsals for her performance Holding Present, which was a collaboration with Ictus, the Brussels-based ensemble for contemporary music. Bárbara Wagner and Benjamin de Burca show how Frevo, a traditional Brazilian dance, places the self-representation and autonomy of the dancer first. Darius Dolatyari-Dolatdoust treats the costume like a score that grants the performer a new sensory perception of their body. (LA)HORDE offers a contemporary take on dance as ritual within the context of music festivals, collective joy and mass consumption. None of the artworks in this opening exhibition use spoken language; instead, it is only the body that speaks. Under circumstances where speaking becomes pressured or even impossible, artists have been known to find other ways to open doors and let in the unknown.

Authors: Godart Bakkers, Laura Herman

The Fondation Vincent van Gogh Arles is delighted to present Van Gogh’s famous “cosmic poem” Starry Night (Arles, September 1888), one of the masterpieces in the collection of the Musée d’Orsay. The arrival of this key work in Arles, just a few metres from where it was made, provides an opportunity to produce an exhibition that sheds new light on both the sources the artist drew on to create it and its enormous influence.

The exhibition Van Gogh and the Stars, curated by Jean de Loisy and Bice Curiger, takes into consideration the unique climate of the second half of the nineteenth century, both in terms of literature and science. Both artists and thinkers of the day influenced the popularity of astronomy, which spread notably through literary works by the likes of Victor Hugo and Jules Verne; at the same time, painters such as Jean-François Millet, Camille Corot, and James McNeill Whistler were fascinated by the effects of the night, the clear light of the stars, and knowledge of the cosmos.

Intellectuals of this period used words and images to illustrate their new discoveries – copies of astronomer Camille Flammarion’s writings, for example, sold in the hundreds of thousands in the time leading up to the creation of Van Gogh’s night scenes. Such discoveries were popularised by magazines that were hugely influential. Science fiction and bold metaphysical hypotheses added mystery and thrills to the craze and contributed greatly to the climate in which Vincent van Gogh’s nocturnal works were born.

The exhibition presents some of the research that fascinated the public of the time, including the work of great scientific illustrators such as Étienne Léopold Trouvelot and Lord Ross’s drawings of spiral galaxies which so resemble those of Van Gogh. This movement and the colours of the night were augmented by the advent of urban lighting, whose glow and reflections punctuate the famous view of the Rhône.

The influence of this nocturnal scene has been considerable, as shown in the work of subsequent artists such as Edvard Munch, Augusto Giacometti, Robert Delaunay, František Kupka, Kasimir Malevitch, Georgia O’Keeffe, Helen Frankenthaler and other major figures who are featured in the exhibition.

Van Gogh’s examination of the stars, however, is just as remarkable – we know that he studied them meticulously by the precise arrangement of the constellations in his paintings. In a letter to his brother Theo in July 1888, he imagines the stars as the refuge of the dead. This belief, which features prominently in para-scientific literature from the mid-nineteenth century, also influenced Van Gogh’s contemporaries, such as Akseli Gallen-Kallela, Odilon Redon, James Ensor, Wenzel Hablik, and Constantin Ciurlionis. A fascination with the night has persisted in contemporary art, where it has taken different forms. Works by Tony Cragg, Alicja Kwade, Anselm Kiefer, Mariko Mori, Gillian Brett, Alfred Smith, Dove Allouche, Yves Klein, Lee Bontecou, and others will also be included in this journey to the stars undertaken thanks to the return of Starry Night to the banks of the river that inspired it…

CALM – Centre d’Art La Meute invites you to discover the first exhibition of its 2024-2025 cultural season. The title of the exhibition refers to the film “Born in Flames”, directed by Lizzie Borden (Detroit, Michigan, USA) in 1983.

The film had a profound effect on us, so we decided to design and build an exhibition around its narrative and environment. It depicts a clandestine women’ s army developing in a dystopian New Y ork. As social unrest shakes the streets, brigades of women on bicycles roam the grim urban landscape, fending off rapists in particular . But much of the dramatic tension stems from the efforts of women – racialized and white, queer and heterosexual, working-class and elite – to understand each other and work together .

Considered by cinema to be in the science fiction genre at the time of its release, its discourse is utterly contemporary and real forty years on. Its radicalism, typical of the essay genre, challenges and stimulates reflection on the workings of our society and the place violence occupies within it.

This exhibition brings together women who, in their respective work, bear witness to political links with film or aesthetic links with the genre of science fiction and under ground cultures. The exhibition’ s scenography is an urban mise en abyme, between dense and open spaces, oppressive and liberating, from the grid, a reproducible module, to open squares. The aim was to integrate the primordial and the futuristic, following the example of the generic city model (Rem Koolhaas) that is Manhattan.

A proposal and text by Oriane Emery & Jean-Rodolphe Petter

On the ground and in the atmosphere, as both an element and a resource, water constitutes us and overflows the world. Protean in form – rain, seas, droplets, dew, streams, clouds, fog, and tears – it is the essential source of all life. Diverted, extracted, and polluted, water has now become a vital issue in the ongoing ecological crisis. But although it has been conquered, the abyssal depths remain today more mysterious than the Moon, land of dreams, inhabited by fantastic monsters.

This exhibition follows the cycle of water, from sunken civilizations to ritual practices and the troubled waters of trade routes. The hybrid figure of the siren or mermaid, by turns malevolent and protective, half woman, half animal, acts as a guide to navigate between these worlds, from the depths to the surface. Her ambivalence resonates with that of water, a space of metamorphoses, between waters of rejuvenation and of doom.

The show invites us to explore the different states of water through the artists’ eyes, from its representation to its political implications, from the commodity transformed into a resource to the metaphorical quest for its source. Diving into this liquid world opens up a host of contradictions, when tales of water’s origins intermingle with those that conjure up future times in which it threatens us with flooding and drought, and sea levels rise while rivers run dry.

“Mermaids are part of our feminist history, and losing sight of this belonging leads us to consider them without correlating them to gender, species, race, humanity, (…) Mermaids force us to pay attention to the question of becoming, to that of life in threads of water that make the world permeable and connected, outside any fantasy of total purification. This should serve not as a model, but as a political, artistic, academic and, above all, ethical direction: becoming-sirens are intimately linked to our futures and to the reinvention of the subject in the age of our tragic ecologies”.

Kunsthal Mechelen presents the exhibition “The Last Place They Thought Of”, curated by Sorana Munsya.

The title is borrowed from the Afro-Canadian intellectual Katherine McKittrick, whose research explores the links between geography, race and marginalisation, particularly for black women.

This exhibition invites us to reflect on the possibility of a black conceptualisation of geography, in contrast to traditional notions of space. Traditional geography renders space transparent, taking into account only its rationality and Cartesian identity. By emphasising the visible and the measurable, this vision leaves to the margins the idea of a certain opacity of spaces and their narratives.

Drawing on the thinking and creations of these artists, “The Last Place They Thought Of”seeks to explore and rethink notions of territory and space from a black female perspective. It highlights stories of black female resistance and acts of reparation, while also reflecting on how the living experience of hostile spaces can produce practices of care and imagination. By taking social, cultural, political and imaginative dimensions seriously, the black female perspective can no longer be ignored when reading our spaces and understanding what’s at stake in our territories.

Among the artworks, Lungiswa Gqunta’s Tending to the Harvest of Dreams installation uses barbed wire wrapped in colourful textiles to explore the impact of Apartheid in South Africa, where even in its softened form, violence persists beneath a gentle and bittersweet surface. Similarly, Soñ Gweha’s Des Safous pour les Bayam-Sellam installation uses ceramic safou replicas and a soundscape combining revolutionary Mozambican songs with the artist’s conversations with market women to symbolise the interconnectedness and ongoing anti-colonial struggle between Africa and its diaspora.

This multidisciplinary exhibition, featuring video, photography, installation, sculpture, drawing, and painting, brings together 11 Belgium-based and international artists, including both existing works and new productions.

Additionally, the collective Black Archive has been invited by the curator to contribute with a film program that either responds to or provides an additional perspective on the exhibition’s themes. The program will be held at Filmhuis (Mechelen’s cultural center) and will launch on December 14, along with a series of talks featuring three of the exhibition’s artists: Gaëlle Choisne, Michèle Magema, and Soñ Gweha.

Sorana Munsya