Currently in Antwerp
“AS I WALK I RESIST
opening Friday October 17, 2025
from 7 - 10 pm
October 17 - November 09, 2025
“Ria Pacquee’s artistic process begins on the street. As a teenager she stood on an Antwerp street corner and waited to see what might happen. Consequently over several decades she has walked through the thorough fares and side streets of this city and many others across the world. Whether in Vienna, Kathmandu, Mexico City or Varanasi, she engages in her surroundings, acutely attentive to the fluctuation of events, the speed and slowness of things, finding the magical in the seemingly mundane. Whether as a performer or an active eye behind the camera, the theatre of everyday life is her medium. Ria’s practice is wholly informed by the activity of walking. The rhythms of walking, talking and looking bring forth a riffing with words, actions, sounds and images. The rhythm of her walking generates a pulse that exists throughout her work, like a heartbeat, a drumbeat, an earthbeat…
…Displayed are a series of small curtains hanging from walking sticks. These are inspired by the thresholds, open doorways and windows, Ria has encountered on her many journeys. While alluding to the boundary between public and private space the curtains also speak of a softer more permeable boundary in which the cloth suggests a welcoming, protective portal to
conviviality and communing in which the Western ideas of inside and outside do not apply. The curtain is an ambiguous intermediary…”
Excerpt of the exhibition text by Michael Curran (read the full text here)
︎ Ria Pacquée
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Upcoming in Ghent
“Stab Candy”
opening Saturday November 22, 2025
from 6 - 10 pm
November 22 - December 14, 2025
Rufus Michielsen (b.1982) Resides and operates in Antwerp, Belgium. His oeuvre is equally informed by early modernist and Dadaist artists, Situationism, and CoBrA, as it is by the realms of graffiti, video games, and underground cartoons. This amalgamation serves as a touchstone for Michielsen's multifaceted expressions across various mediums: canvases adorned with paint or drawings etched onto paper, sculpture, and unconventional media.
His creations exist within the liminal space between abstraction and figuration. Michielsen revels in a playful exploration of anthropomorphism within the abstract forms that emerge from the strokes of paint. Often, he strives to encapsulate the sensation of a kind of sensory overload, akin to the experience of surfing the internet or strolling down the street. In his drawings, he endeavors to unearth a particular poetry inherent in that process.
Tom Volkaert’s (b.1989) sculptural work is a testimony to the materiality of memory as much as it is an ongoing tribute to the spiritual and shamanic force of art. Born in Antwerp in 1989, Volkaert’s sculptural work is a carefully balanced combination of refined artistic craftsmanship and the strategic use of unpredictability that comes into play when working with enameled ceramics, epoxy, or oxidized metal. Many of his works consist of circles on legs, which the artist likes to call steering-wheels. These works are like totems: symbolic and organic artifacts that make present the otherworldly alien life in the cosmos and that put us in touch with something radically different from us. On the edges and inside these circles, contorted arachnoid limbs, intestines, and sickly satanic tongues are carefully arranged and held in suspended animation. It is as if these circles are portals to another cosmic dimension and something wholly other than human life is trying to get through, a lumpy otherworldly and alienated organic gesturing at us in a way that feels both familiar and estranging.
But Volkaert’s so-called steering wheels are also a totem for his own life and memories, a way of navigating and coming to terms with his own life. For Volkaert, colors embody memory. Personal memories first of all. And thus, the lived memory of the cinereous cigarette stains on the caput morteem colored carpet in his parent’s living room is reenacted and relived through the use of these colors in his work. But universal memories too. The usage of umbilical greyish pink and placenta-colored red appeal to a birthing process all of us have gone through; engaging with these colors, Volkaert’s sculptures establish a connection to the matrixial mother in which all creativity is situated, making the viewer receptive to the most intimate and estranging experience of being alive.
Conjuring up these contradictory feelings and holding them together is, ultimately, at the core of Volkaert’s artistic practice. Holding together contradictory sensations, his art opens a space where feelings of joy, surprise, wonder, and disgust are enclosed in the same ceramic totem or metal cut-out or epoxy statues.
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“AS I WALK I RESIST
(Bang the drum and Fuck the gun)”
with Ria Pacquée
opening Friday October 17, 2025
from 7 - 10 pm
October 17 - November 09, 2025
“Ria Pacquee’s artistic process begins on the street. As a teenager she stood on an Antwerp street corner and waited to see what might happen. Consequently over several decades she has walked through the thorough fares and side streets of this city and many others across the world. Whether in Vienna, Kathmandu, Mexico City or Varanasi, she engages in her surroundings, acutely attentive to the fluctuation of events, the speed and slowness of things, finding the magical in the seemingly mundane. Whether as a performer or an active eye behind the camera, the theatre of everyday life is her medium. Ria’s practice is wholly informed by the activity of walking. The rhythms of walking, talking and looking bring forth a riffing with words, actions, sounds and images. The rhythm of her walking generates a pulse that exists throughout her work, like a heartbeat, a drumbeat, an earthbeat…
…Displayed are a series of small curtains hanging from walking sticks. These are inspired by the thresholds, open doorways and windows, Ria has encountered on her many journeys. While alluding to the boundary between public and private space the curtains also speak of a softer more permeable boundary in which the cloth suggests a welcoming, protective portal to
conviviality and communing in which the Western ideas of inside and outside do not apply. The curtain is an ambiguous intermediary…”
Excerpt of the exhibition text by Michael Curran (read the full text here)
︎ Ria Pacquée
Upcoming in Ghent
“Stab Candy”
with Rufus Michielsen & Tom Volkaert
opening Saturday November 22, 2025
from 6 - 10 pm
November 22 - December 14, 2025
Rufus Michielsen (b.1982) Resides and operates in Antwerp, Belgium. His oeuvre is equally informed by early modernist and Dadaist artists, Situationism, and CoBrA, as it is by the realms of graffiti, video games, and underground cartoons. This amalgamation serves as a touchstone for Michielsen's multifaceted expressions across various mediums: canvases adorned with paint or drawings etched onto paper, sculpture, and unconventional media.
His creations exist within the liminal space between abstraction and figuration. Michielsen revels in a playful exploration of anthropomorphism within the abstract forms that emerge from the strokes of paint. Often, he strives to encapsulate the sensation of a kind of sensory overload, akin to the experience of surfing the internet or strolling down the street. In his drawings, he endeavors to unearth a particular poetry inherent in that process.
Tom Volkaert’s (b.1989) sculptural work is a testimony to the materiality of memory as much as it is an ongoing tribute to the spiritual and shamanic force of art. Born in Antwerp in 1989, Volkaert’s sculptural work is a carefully balanced combination of refined artistic craftsmanship and the strategic use of unpredictability that comes into play when working with enameled ceramics, epoxy, or oxidized metal. Many of his works consist of circles on legs, which the artist likes to call steering-wheels. These works are like totems: symbolic and organic artifacts that make present the otherworldly alien life in the cosmos and that put us in touch with something radically different from us. On the edges and inside these circles, contorted arachnoid limbs, intestines, and sickly satanic tongues are carefully arranged and held in suspended animation. It is as if these circles are portals to another cosmic dimension and something wholly other than human life is trying to get through, a lumpy otherworldly and alienated organic gesturing at us in a way that feels both familiar and estranging.
But Volkaert’s so-called steering wheels are also a totem for his own life and memories, a way of navigating and coming to terms with his own life. For Volkaert, colors embody memory. Personal memories first of all. And thus, the lived memory of the cinereous cigarette stains on the caput morteem colored carpet in his parent’s living room is reenacted and relived through the use of these colors in his work. But universal memories too. The usage of umbilical greyish pink and placenta-colored red appeal to a birthing process all of us have gone through; engaging with these colors, Volkaert’s sculptures establish a connection to the matrixial mother in which all creativity is situated, making the viewer receptive to the most intimate and estranging experience of being alive.
Conjuring up these contradictory feelings and holding them together is, ultimately, at the core of Volkaert’s artistic practice. Holding together contradictory sensations, his art opens a space where feelings of joy, surprise, wonder, and disgust are enclosed in the same ceramic totem or metal cut-out or epoxy statues.
