With Et si les mots ne suffisent plus à te décrire, ma chérie, Gaëlle Choisne examines Haitian colonial history by confronting still images from the past and contemporary moving images. This dual temporality questions the slow pace of social transformation, resistance to postcolonial change, and the ways in which history continues to shape contemporary perception. The artist juxtaposes digital videos shot in Haiti with a fixed UV print derived from archival material from the Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF), bearing witness to a colonial history that has often been obscured.

Traces of the colonial past resonate with living images, creating a tension between written and visual narratives. Attentive to contemporary issues, Gaëlle Choisne’s practice interrogates the complexity of the world and its political and cultural disorder – whether it be the overexploitation of nature and its resources or the remnants of colonial history, where Creole esoteric traditions, myths, and popular cultures intertwine. By foregrounding the relationships between Haiti and France, Et si les mots ne suffisent plus à te décrire, ma chérie offers a reflection on the role of images in the transmission of history.

Magical Realism: Imagining Natural Dis/order brings together over thirty artists at WIELS and argos, offering new ideas and perspectives on the relationship with our planet.

Adopting the prism of two seemingly opposing terms—magic and realism—, the exhibition examines how artists imagine living environments amid the ecological, political and social challenges that mark today’s world.

The title of the exhibition is borrowed from the artistic and literary genre known as magical realism, which is characterised by its infusion of worlds of magic, dreams and myth into mundane narratives—creating stories that redefine the boundaries of reality. The exhibition looks at how the porosity between ‘magic’ and ‘reality’ may open up spaces for other horizons to emerge in response to proliferating monocultures, precarious lives, and climate transformation.

When the world of science and hard facts has been torn apart from the world of magic and intuition, how to reconcile this fracture, what traces does it leave and how do we repair it? The exhibition navigates these questions through works that shape worlds via painting, moving image, sound and installation. They engage with different spaces, from the cosmos and its galaxies to the scientist’s lab; matters such as bodies of water, bacterial skins or 3D prints; and geologic processes surfacing through the underground rumbling of the earth or the noise of a sinking city.

The artists navigate different, complementary and contradictory ways of relating to ecosystems and myths of the “natural” environment, seeking refuge in dreams and in the raw matter and bare life of the world. At the confluence of analytic and speculative tools, Magical Realism gestures towards restoring connections in a biosphere exhausted by exploitation, dispossession and debt.

Magical Realism follows  The Absent Museum (2017) and Risquons-tout (2020) as the third in-house realisation of a recurring ambitious exhibition format developed and conceived by the WIELS team, focusing on specific patterns within contemporary artistic practice that underscore the necessity for transformation.

Through a large-scale exhibition—including a section organised at argos—a publication and a live program including workshops, talks, screenings, walks and performances, Magical Realism reflects an ecology that addresses both the aesthetic implications of our relationship with natural worlds at a tipping point, as well as the social, economic and scientific implications of exploring and shifting our conceptions of the planet.