Picture Perfect, 4 new picture exhibitions and the facility of ladies

Every Sunday, Belga English picks its favorite occasions from the cultural agenda. This week: BOZAR continues its exploration of magnificence requirements via a recent lens, FOMU debuts 4 new picture exhibitions with a variety of topics and KU Leuven celebrates the position of ladies during the last century.

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Picture Perfect, till 16 August, Bozar, Brussels

What does it imply to be lovely right now, and who will get to determine? With Picture Perfect: Beauty via a Contemporary Lens, BOZAR invitations guests to rethink probably the most persistent and highly effective concepts shaping trendy life. Bringing collectively works by 65 artists from all over the world, the exhibition explores how pictures, movie and video have formed and challenged society’s understanding of magnificence from the Nineteen Seventies to the current.

In an age of filters, selfies and fixed visible comparability, the stress to look “picture perfect” has by no means been stronger. Photography has performed a vital position on this course of, serving to to unfold aesthetic developments and reinforce slender beliefs of youth, perfection and desirability. Yet the identical medium has additionally turn out to be a robust device of resistance. Through self-portraiture, efficiency and documentary approaches, many artists use the digital camera to query these requirements and reclaim the picture on their very own phrases.

Running alongside Bellezza e Bruttezza, Bozar’s exhibition on magnificence and ugliness in Renaissance artwork, Picture Perfect provides a recent perspective on the identical theme. While the Renaissance present traces how classical concepts of concord and perfection had been established in European artwork, Picture Perfect considers how these beliefs proceed to form trendy visible tradition.

Moving between critique and chance, the exhibition brings collectively artists who dismantle inherited requirements and others who think about magnificence as fluid, numerous and deeply human. Themes of ageing, vulnerability, queer id and hybridity emerge as new visible languages rejoice complexity reasonably than perfection.

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Four new picture exhibitions, 20 March – ongoing, FOMU, Antwerp

Four new exhibitions are coming to Fotomuseum Antwerpen (FOMU), every providing a distinct perspective on pictures’s energy to form id, reminiscence and social narratives.

The Heart of the Matter – Carrie Mae Weems

In this main retrospective, American artist Carrie Mae Weems examines the intertwined themes of race, gender, energy and historic reminiscence via pictures and video. Often putting herself inside the body as topic, narrator or witness, Weems makes use of private storytelling to disclose broader social truths.

Her work strikes between intimate and monumental settings. Domestic areas corresponding to kitchen tables to websites are marked by historic trauma, together with church buildings and former plantations. These environments turn out to be levels the place forgotten histories and hidden narratives are introduced into view.

The exhibition contains greater than 100 works, that includes landmark sequence corresponding to Kitchen Table Series alongside newer tasks. Together they reveal how Weems blends autobiography, efficiency and documentary methods to query how historical past is written and who’s represented inside it.

 

IF REVOLUTION IS A SICKNESS – Diane Severin Nguyen

In her visually putting set up, Diane Severin Nguyen blends the shiny aesthetics of popular culture with sharp political reflection. Drawing on the language of music movies and efficiency, the artist creates an immersive atmosphere that’s each seductive and unsettling.

The work centres on a younger Vietnamese-Polish woman in Warsaw navigating questions of id, belonging and political expectation. Through imagery impressed by Okay-pop and youth tradition, Nguyen explores how nationalism and world media form the best way folks perceive themselves.

The set up unfolds like a coming-of-age narrative, however beneath its vibrant floor lies a deeper inquiry: what does revolution imply right now? By juxtaposing catchy visible spectacle with important themes, Nguyen displays on the pressures dealing with a era rising up in a world outlined by political rigidity and identities.
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Families

Photography has lengthy been a method of preserving private historical past. The exhibition Families revisits this acquainted territory whereas questioning the assumptions behind the standard household portrait. Drawing from the museum’s intensive assortment, the exhibition brings collectively historic albums and modern artworks that discover the numerous methods households are represented and imagined.

Rather than presenting a single definition, the works reveal household as one thing fluid, complicated and generally contradictory.

Artists corresponding to Diane Arbus, Henri Cartier-Bresson and Sunil Gupta seem alongside modern photographers who query the boundaries of kinship and belonging. The exhibition turns into a dialogue between previous and current, highlighting how images form collective reminiscence whereas additionally leaving area to rethink what household means right now.
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Tenderly There – Tashattot Collective

Curated by the Brussels-based Tashattot Collective, Tenderly There focuses on representations of queer intimacy inside the SWANA area, Southwest Asia and North Africa. Through pictures and archival materials, the exhibition traces how on a regular basis gestures of affection, companionship and presence have been documented throughout time.

The exhibition presents historic pictures from the Arab Image Foundation alongside modern works by artists corresponding to Kader Attia and the duo Lara Tabet and Randa Mirza. This dialogue between previous and current reveals how visible tradition can protect fragile histories of queer life whereas additionally opening new areas for visibility and neighborhood.

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Strong Women, till 3 May, KU Leuven

At KU Leuven, two exhibitions open facet by facet, providing complementary views on girls’s roles in society each up to now and current.

ReIncluGen: Rethinking Inclusion and Gender Empowerment focuses on the experiences of ladies and women with a migration background. Developed as a part of a world analysis venture, the exhibition brings collectively images from a contest and a “photovoice” examine involving members in Austria, Belgium, Italy, Spain and Poland.

Using pictures as a participatory device, the venture invited girls to doc and replicate on their each day realities, creating area for private tales about id, belonging and empowerment. Fashion additionally performs a task within the exhibition: stylist Sana Barghouti presents a sequence of clothes impressed by the tales of Belgian members, together with one created with volunteers from the Empact vzw stitching group.

The second exhibition, From the Kitchen to the World: Women in International Catholic Organizations, appears to be like again to the many years after the Second World War, when Catholic laywomen started carving out influential roles on the worldwide stage. Travelling broadly and dealing with establishments such because the Vatican and the United Nations, these girls advocated for improvement, social progress and ladies’s rights throughout the West and the Global South. At the centre of the story is Christine de Hemptinne, a Ghent-born aristocrat whose intensive archive sheds mild on a largely ignored community of Catholic girls balancing world engagement with the enduring excellent of the homemaker.

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​​(MOH)

_​^{#FlandersNewsService | Be Nice To Me (Flatten 04) from Open My Glade (Flatten), 2000, video set up by Pipilotti Rist (video nonetheless) © Pipilotti Rist / 2025, SABAM Courtesy the artist, Hauser & Wirth and Luhring Augustine}

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