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

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”.

The exhibition Temple of Love. Cœur concludes the residency of Gaëlle Choisne (Cherbourg, 1985) at Scuola Piccola Zattere. Here, new commissions, site-specific interventions and existing works by the artist are put in dialogue with a selection of paintings by Haitian artists from the Jean-Marie Drot collection. 

Temple of Love is a long-term project (2018 – ongoing) developing across successive chapters and drawing from Roland Barthes’ A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments (1977). Through an approach that combines multiple media, techniques and materials, Choisne builds a progressive, evolving narrative that shapes spaces of coexistence and collaboration, hospitality and affection.

What the artist calls a “temple” is this fluid configuration that is temporarily embedded into the architectural and institutional context of the museum, materially and symbolically turning it into a place where new rules and bonds can emerge. The ritual and sacral connotations are summoned by Choisne not to reproduce the auratic dimen- sion of the museum, which derives from acts of separation and classification, but, on the contrary, to hybridize forms of knowledge that belong to different spheres, cultures and histories. 

In the new chapter of Temple of Love, entitled Cœur after the eponymous entry from Barthes’book, the spiritual and affective connection between the body and the outer world is explored through the symbolism of the house: the architecture of the domestic that hosts, embraces, protects. The exhibition space is reconfigured as a complex ecosystem, each room embodying a chakra, the centers located along the spine that regulate the flow of vital energy in the body. Starting with the heart, positioned at the center of museum space, the exhibition unfolds in two directions creating a circular, immersive flow, an invitation by the artist to a healing procession. The identification between architecture and body resonates in the word Lakay, meaning both house and home in the Creole language, that is depicted as a place of encounters, of spoken words, of intimate moments both sad and joyous in Haitian painting. The homeland of the artist’s mother, and a central reference throughout the artist’s work, Haiti is the guest of honor of this project, invited through the works of eighteen Haitian painters belonging to the private collection of French writer and documentary filmmaker Jean-Marie Drot. The works depict everyday scenes of collective activities and country life, blending with allusions to the ceremonies, rituals and symbols of the Vodou religion. Amplifying the scenes, figures and forms found in the paintings, the exhibition weaves a dense, affectionate and generative dialogue with the spiritual mysticism of Haitian art.

The Jean-Marie Drot collection is an idiosyncratic one comprising more than 500 artworks that Jean-Marie Drot (1929-2015) gathered during his lifetime travelling as a journalist and producer for French television. A pioneer in the use of audiovisual material in culture, Drot became well known thanks to his 1962 series The hot hours in Montparnasse in which he interviewed important figures coming from the Dada and Surrealist movements, such as Man Ray, Cocteau, and Duchamp. However, Drot’s passion focused on naif art, especially self-taught artists, from 1968 when he dis- covered an exhibition catalog with artworks by Yugoslav naif painters. This was the starting point for many adventures that led Drot to seek creative work outside the major artistic movements and Western centers of art, in places such as Bulgaria, Peru, Brazil, Haiti, Greece, Egypt and Japan. Drot’s special interest and expertise in Haitian art led him to direct the video documentary Haiti: A Painted History (1997), and to curate several exhibitions and catalogs, including Journal de voyage en Haïti au pays des peintres de la fête et du vaudou (1974), Haïti: Art Naïf, Art Vaudou (1988) and Haitian Painters: The Encounter of Two Worlds (1992). 

The Drot collection is hosted on the Cycladic island of Ios in Greece in the atypical “house-sculpture” – designed by the Greek artist and his lifelong friend Yannis Yaitis – and in a separate building inside the house complex. It is entitled the Museum of Friendship and, as of today, remains closed to the public. The collection was included in this exhibition as a first attempt at activating it through the prism of contemporary art at the initiative of the curator Eva Vaslamatzi, who has undertaken in-depth research into the Drot collection.

Irene Calderoni and Eva Vaslamatzi

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.

From 14 June 2025 to 2 February 2026, in an exceptional collaboration with the Musée du Louvre, the Centre Pompidou-Metz will be presenting an unusual exhibition dedicated to the creativity of copyists. Copying was central to the classical tradition. Copying the works of great artists is a tool for learning about the canons, techniques and stories. Absorbing their expertise and adopting their mastery is a pathway to knowledge and artistic creation, from the most academic to the most contemporary.

A number of artists have received the following invitation from the two curators: ‘Imagine a copy of a work of your choosing from the collections of the Musée du Louvre.’

All eras, from antiquity to the 19^th century, mingle in a fluid layout, whose exhibition design refers to classic forms of museum display, revealing how many different periods coexist at the Louvre.

Even though many great artists, from Matisse to Picasso, copied the works of past artists, modern art seems to have preferred an approach in which the copy was devalued and continuity was replaced by rupture, figuration by abstraction, freehand painting and sketching by an increase in the number of forms possible.

Today, however, it would seem that the issue of the copy is topical once again. Firstly, there has been a return to figuration in contemporary painting and many painters, some of them young, are borrowing motifs from works of the past and giving them new life. Secondly, the nature of the copy is being transformed by digital technology: the image’s multiplication and availability, its abstraction and the absence of a physical medium it a vehicle for copying. Finally, the increase in the creative methods now available have extended the meaning of the copy, ranging from 3D scanning in sculpture, which allows for more precise copies, to video games and the copying of life in the digital world.

The Musée du Louvre and its collections have played a key role in this history of copying, which spans centuries and is also a history of art in the modern period (from the 15th century onwards). The Louvre, ‘a huge book in which we learn to read,’ as Paul Cézanne put it, is the last museum to have a copyists’ bureau, which has been in existence since the institution was created in 1793. It has been and remains central to the practice of copying in France and the West. To mark its two hundredth anniversary, the museum organised a famous exhibition, ‘Copier-Créer’, which highlighted the important role of copying at a time when it was being ideologically called into question.

Copysts was born of a different era, and is an entirely different project : a number of contemporary artists have been invited to make copies at the Musée du Louvre, following in the footsteps of many of their predecessors, both famous and little known. The guests invited to perform this act of decoding, investigation and understanding, juggling old forms and new, include painters, draughtsmen sculptors, video artists, designers and writers. They offer different ways of copying and different conceptions of the copy and of the status of the works exhibited, in a tension between originality and duplication.

This exhibition brings together this form of atistic creation and this heritage, revealing them in a fresh light. Contemporary art does not necessarily seek to break with history but, on the contrary, to draw on it and be enriched by it, to understand it and understand itself. This project, which is both a continuation of history (in the copy’s very form) and radically new (through the works created), is also a meditation on the current state of life. At the same time, it is a mediation on creation, in this ‘unseparated’ world, in which the power of works must contend with with the power of images.