Exhibitions

Cécile Massart is a Belgian artist who uses different mediums: drawing, engraving, installations, photography, video, artist’s book. In 1994, the matter of locating sites used for the storage of radioactive waste becomes the primary subject of her work. She seeks to raise awareness about the visibility of these sites among the agencies managing them. Her goal is to incorporate this uniquely 21st century archaeological stratus into the landscape, thus calling on every individuals’ own sense of responsibility. What type of energy policy do we want for the future? What do we want to pass down to future generations?

In this new exhibition, Benjamin Installé displays ambitious painting, which occupies the entirety of the Botanique Gallery. Somewhere between a large-scale historical scene, the backdrop of a play and cymatium mouldings, the focal piece of the exhibition represents a deserted space, littered with objects that have clearly been left behind by their owners and await their hypothetical return. The occupants of the painting - artists, construction workers, delivery workers or homeless people - have gone. They might have simply left their place of work at the end of the day, or perhaps we arrive just after the party has ended and everyone has already gone home to nurse a hangover.

Memymom is the collaboration between mother-daughter artist duo Marilène Coolens & Lisa De Boeck. Two self-taught photographers who work and live in Brussels, Belgium. The cross-generational project began with what the artist duo describes as The Umbilical Vein, a reference to the analogue image made between 1990 and 2003. An intimate archive of family photos in which Marilène encouraged Lisa to express herself and to invent her own improvised theatre sketches.

Over the years, these semi-staged dreamscape portraits developed into a mature conversation that deals not only with metamorphosis, personal identity, potential, and the mother-daughter relationship, but has evolved into a plea for sensual analysis and tragic romanticism. It reveals both the foundations of the close bond and the professional career of this artistic duo, who have worked together under the moniker memymom since 2004.

The relationship to space and habitat is central to the work of Élise Peroi, which is permeated by Michel Foucault's reflections on "heterotopias". He writes that "The garden is a carpet where the whole world comes to accomplish its symbolic perfection and the carpet is a mobile garden through space".

Following Cédric Dambrain’s performance as part of Stephan Bailleux’s monographic exhibition La peinture et son double, at the Musée d'Ixelles in 2014, the two artists decided to further develop their collaboration and to jointly explore common means of expression within the same architectural framework: the Botanique Museum. This space not only provides a sense of cohesion between their respective disciplines, it also serves as a setting inextricably linked to their artwork.

This exhibition, Bounce, focusses on the interplay between connected art forms: triggering the spectators’ active perception and drawing them in to become an intrinsic part of the artwork.

This exhibition – the first of its kind - designed as an experience, identifies the creation of links as one of the fundamental questions of contemporary art.

Eva L’Hoest (1991 - Belgium) explores how all types of mental images, in particular memory and reminiscence, are able to reappear in a technological form.