Listen to our podcast!
is an exhibition space founded in 2019 by Sandra Meilūnaitė & Dilum Coppens, and joined in 2022 by Yannick Marien. After opening up their studio and adjoining space for an exhibition under the name "BETWEEN (STAGE)", they decided to keep the ball rolling, renovate the room and use it as an artist-run exhibition space for young and emerging artists. By hosting regular exhibitions for artists trying to do what they love, they hope to show Brussels the fresh young faces of promising creators and broaden both the artists’ as well as their own network.
Upcoming exhibitions
Past exhibitions
passage, October - November 2023
LARYNX, June 2023
S.o.t.D.P., June 2023
any/way, May 2023
WORTH MORE / WORTH LESS, March 2023
Avant la lettre, November 2022
DEMOLUTION, April 2022
BruocsellA, November 2021
SEA BREEZE, August 2021
An Exhibition by Ines Thora, August 2021
State of Things, May 2021
beauty/?, July 2020
BETWEEN (STAGE), August 2019
Subscribe to our newsletter
passage
28 October - 5 November 2023
For passage, our latest exhibition at K.L.8, we invited 6 artists whose works evoke liminal spaces in a visual or a conceptual sense.
Walking into a liminal space is a recognisable feeling. Abandoned train stations or office corridors, where the light suddenly takes on a new unsettling quality, can strike people as ‘liminal’. An entire internet aesthetic has grown around people’s need to share images and descriptions of spaces that made them feel uncomfortable in a particular way, that appeared to exist outside of fixed reality. In part, a liminal space is also a mental space everyone carries within. All of life’s pivotal changes—puberty, falling in love, moving between apartments, spiritual growth, artistic inspiration—require some form of liminality, and many mystical traditions depend on some notion of a liminal space; in the undefined wilderness the divine, or the Other, could reveal itself to humans.
The Latin word limen means ‘the threshold’, and the liminal exists ‘between and betwixt the positions assigned and arrayed by law, custom, convention, and ceremonial.’ It is an animated emptiness, a place between two worlds or two realities; between different stages in life, that induces fear and profound confusion, but at the same time feels replete with new possibilities, and allows for reflection.
Artists tend to have a closer understanding of liminality. Perhaps our way of living and working always keeps us one step removed from complete assimilation into the conventional; perhaps because artists need to disappear into the undefined every time they start a new project; every new work of art is a personal transformation that the artist has to see through from beginning to end on their own.
With work by Carolina Papetti, Luciana Lopez Schütz, Siska Vastesaeger, Stijn De Pourcq, Tiemke Gauderis & Wenjun Chen.
LARYNX
24 June - 2 July 2023
For her exhibition 'Larynx', Brussels-based multimedia artist Merzedes Sturm-Lie, explores the blurred lines between emotional affect and reason. Inspired by the myths of Narcissus (who fell in love with his own reflection), Orpheus and Eurydice (song as passage between life and death) and stories where mirrors are portals to other worlds, Merzedes Sturm-Lie questions barriers between the tangible and the intangible, the real and the imagined. This exhibition is part of her ongoing project researching current and historical notions of voice originating from the fields of musicology, medical science and human anatomy.
S.o.t.D.P.
3 - 11 June 2023
Over the past two years, Dilum Coppens retreated to his studio and desublimed the different aspects of his artistic practice. “S.o.t.D.P.” is the result of this reflective period, an exhibition that combines paintings, sculpture, video, and a new experiment with virtual reality into a comprehensive installation.
To shape his research, he returned to the idea of an artefact: a historical object with a mystical or unknown meaning. This time he focused specifically on religious artefacts and the way they give an aura to prophets and the beliefs they give shape to.
“S.o.t.D.P.” visualizes the history and legacy of a fictitious prophet. Structured like a fragmentary vision, the works mimic the mysterious and equivocal cluster of meaning that archaeological artefacts and religious imagery contain. Dilum acts like an oracle delivering a message and failing to reach a coherent conclusion, and instead lapsing into a strange phase transition of narrative elements. The use of different media within this project reinforces the collage elements present in the individual works, connecting form and content. They are structured as visual riddles, laden with a playful mysticism, becoming a line of transmission for a meaning that the artist doesn’t quite grasp himself.
Dilum has always been an avid fan of fantasy novels and games. Both these cultural forms are heavily indebted to mythology and how it constructs meaning through narrative. Our ancestors created myths to explain the inexplicable and indeterminate world they were surrounded by. In that sense myths, games, fantasy novels and films offer a kind of escapism, by teasing out a sense of wonder that has largely been lost in our contemporary understanding of the world. Yet this sense of wonder still manifests itself in the gap that continues to exist between mystery and definition, between definite knowledge and bewilderment, and allows us a certain freedom. Coppens tries to recreate this sense of indeterminacy in his works, creating an archaeology of our own age.
Marx referred to religion as opium for the people, and perhaps myths used to serve the same purpose. The instability and inadequacy of meaning as a concept is expressed visually by this disjointed mixture of different media. Consequently, it shows the futility of this human attempt to impose something comforting on the bewildering world around us. Meaning is unreliable in the end. It is the stories human beings cannot help but invent: are they in any way helpful other than in the sense that an illusion is helpful and meaningful as some sort of opium?
any/way
6 - 13 May 2023
After five years, Sandra Meilūnaitė is leaving our studio (but not K.L.8). As an “adieu”, she will be presenting a new installation combining old and new works for a solo exhibition titled “any/way”.
The show will be structured like a labyrinth, an architectural phenomenon that has been present in European culture since Antiquity. Throughout her artistic development, Sandra felt constrained by the bland conventions found in most art exhibitions, and with this labyrinthine installation, she will try to move beyond those limitations.
Her artistic practice resembles a labyrinth in various ways. Sandra’s paintings reflect a continual search for means and techniques that allow her to reveal an undiscovered mental space, structured with formal aspects found in maps and aerial views of our planet. And while her paintings start out with a clear composition, the final result is never predictable. The goal is both unattainable and unknown. Sandra keeps being lost in the labyrinth of her own creation.
Historically, labyrinths were seen as places of great peril. The Labyrinth of Knossos acted as a prison for the Minotaur and at the same time trapped the human sacrifices that were fed to the monster. Nowadays, labyrinths have been converted into entertainment at amusement parks or scientific tools intended to test a guinea pig’s problem-solving abilities.
Being lost, wandering without aim, is considered a waste of time in our productivity-obsessed society, but how can we change and reinvent ourselves without periods of doubt and uncertainty? Precisely this is what intrigues Sandra: being stuck forever while having fun searching for the perfect way, the perfect form, the perfect composition; in pursuit of a space beyond everyone’s reach. The labyrinth, as well as the exhibition, will show the formal imprint of her thinking as an artist.
WORTH MORE / WORTH LESS
26 March - 9 April 2023
For this group exhibition, we show artists whose work reflects on the concept of ‘value’ in art. In what sense can you say that an artwork possesses worth? And does this need to be limited to monetary and material value, or can art have other kinds of value, such as social value, spiritual value, emotional value, ...?
For over a century, the boundaries of this concept have been investigated by a diverse array of artists. Duchamp started out by using an industrially manufactured object for his Fountain instead of creating a traditional, unique art object. Conceptual artists Sol LeWitt and Lawrence Weiner sold written instructions to gallerists and institutions, and considered the physical execution of these instructions to be of secondary importance. With Merda d’Artista, Manzoni sold his own tinned excrement at the gold price, while recently Maurizio Cattelan had a golden toilet plumbed into Blenheim palace and managed to generate an inordinate amount of attention for a banana he duct-taped to the wall at an art fair.
Historically, there have always been gatekeepers with the power to determine the value of an artwork—from the wealthy patrons in ancient Greece and Rome, the Catholic Church, over Renaissance aristocracy, to feudal rulers and emperors. Today might not be that different: those with capital exercise considerable influence in the contemporary art world, and established commercial galleries and well-funded museums govern the market.
Despite such confinements, modern and contemporary artists have widely experimented with value in their works, challenging the conditions that can decide the nature of value, still eliciting discussion and outrage. We are curious what the new generation of artists has to add to the conversation. Surely they are met with the same problem as ever: the possibility that their work is ignored or deemed worthless by the current gatekeepers. In our modern economy, raw materials are usually transformed, through labour and engineering, into products that are more valuable than the sum of their components, yet many artists buy their art supplies and transform them into something that loses almost all of its original economic value.
The artworks engage with this complex and elusive notion of value in art, and contribute an unexpected point of view to an over-used question: ‘In the end, what is it worth?’.
With works by Andrea Balladelli, Chris Dennis, Daniëlle Raspé, Giovanni Casu, JaZoN Frings, jo+kapi, Jorden Boulet, Lea & Adrian, Maria Konschake, Nathaniel Trost, Obed Vleugels, Pancho Westendarp, Rabten Tenzin, Ringo Lisko, Simone Marconi & Yique.
Avant la lettre
29 October - 6 November 2022
Written Word and Image: these are two fundamental components of the known history of art. Both possess different powers, connotations, impediments, advantages, and have different ways of establishing meaning. Whenever they are brought together in a work of art, tension is inevitable, and throughout various cultures their relationship has taken on surprising shapes.
For our newest exhibition, Avant la lettre, we will show the work of 19 artists who incorporate (hand)writing / type / text into their practice, and who explore the interaction between the written word and visual art.
The Image came first, without a doubt. Our ancestors left paintings on cave walls, carved animal bone into effigies, thousands of years before the invention of the first writing systems. But writing got the upper hand, myths and holy Scripture came to determine how human beings related to their surroundings and to each other. We explored the world and aimed to capture all of creation in taxonomies, botanical treatises, laws of physics. Only the supposed truth was ever written down.
In the Modern age however, the power balance started to shift. The written word no longer maintained its precedence over other modes of representation, and the author (who was of course white and male) was no longer accepted as the all-determining voice, whether in academia, film or journalism. Now, under the aegis of new media like television and the internet, the Image appears to have emancipated itself, and has gained an unprecedented ubiquity in all parts of the cultural landscape.
None of us have been taught as children how to interpret images, but reading and writing on the other hand are acquired skills. Does this mean that looking at a painting requires more spontaneity? Is reading more challenging? Can written words offer more meaning than images? We are curious what associations or prejudices contemporary artists have about these two extraordinary human devices. What are their respective powers and shortcomings? And what processes are set in motion when the two are combined into one single piece of art?
With works by Algolit, Andrey Rylov and Maxim Mezentsev, Ash Bowland, Christina Mitrentse, Christine van Poucke, Daniel Arthuus, Daniëlle Raspé, Éanna Mac Cana, Gabriel René Franjou, Hyunbok Lee, Jing Wang, Laurence Petrone, Laurent Fiorentino, Leda Woloshyn, Maarten Inghels, Marija Rinkevičiūtė, Martina Stella, Oliver Doe & Teresa Weißert.
DEMOLUTION
23 April - 1 May 2022
The collapse at the end of the Late Bronze Age, of the Akkadian Empire, the Roman Empires, the Maya, and Easter Island. All of them are examples that we could study and show us the harbingers of ruination. These histories show many signals that our global society is close to coming apart.
This statement can seem rash, and we might think that our society is too global and anchored to completely collapse. And yet … our forebears neither foresaw their end. They were sure of their power and stability.
We cannot deny that more and more social unrest rising to the surface. Manifestations, political polarization, and revolutions have appeared more and more frequently over the last decades. But might it be nothing more than logical that these historical phenomena increase their frequency in a society that keeps evolving and communicating more and more rapidly?
While a collapse often carries a negative connotation, revolution is often desirable, a sign of the fall of an oppressive regime. Yet both of them end in something inevitable: change.
Here, we would like to approach two kinds of societal change.
Firstly, a society can chance through revolutions, such as the French Revolution and the Arab Spring. The people rise up against societal or political systems to tear them down and construct new ones. There are parts that continue to exist, but others are completely destroyed. Although destruction is part of a revolution’s identity, this destruction is conscious and organized to some degree. The people gradually change their systems, identities, their society to a chosen vision.
Secondly, we have the phenomenon of societal collapse, such as the fall of the Roman Empires and the Maya. These destructions aren’t supported or consciously put into motion by these society’s people. They are catastrophes that tumble entire worlds. Undoubtedly, it is a destruction of a greater magnitude. It causes greater and deeper traumas. More of the identity, stability, and systems disappears, if they aren't completely wiped off the map.
The goal of revolution is to bring change through destruction, while a societal collapse is destruction that leads to change.
Our Western society, which celebrated the turn of the last century in a daze of unprecedented stability and prosperity, is experiencing increasing tensions and volatility. Population shifts, outside aggression, untrustworthy leaders, and ecological disaster - Edward Gibbon wrote about these phenomena in his historical analysis of the fall of The Western Roman Empire, and today they are once again part of our topicality.
Artists stand on the fortress walls, they watch and describe what they see. In the steadfast 50s and 60s, their gaze could wander inwardly. They fell back on their own world, making minimal and conceptual art. In turbulent times they expressed fragmentation, confusion.
So they do today. Yet again, something slouches towards Bethlehem. Today's art world is highly individualized, but young artists are once again turning their gaze ever more outwards, to the disturbing circumstances that are advancing towards us. We find their work, their view, their anticipation important. It must therefore be shown.
“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”
- George Santayana
With work by Aathmigan, Davide Zulli, Denys Shantar, Dilum Coppens, Ernest Bessems
Florian Model, George Stamenov, Justine Cappelle, Katya Granova, Luis Chenche, Matthias De Wolf, Paulius Sliaupa & Penny Hallas.
Music by Mike Frison.
BruocsellA
31 October - 5 November 2021
11% of art acquired by the top museums for their permanent collections was by women. 78% of galleries represent more men than women. 27% of living contemporary artists in the Tate Collection are women.
In 2021, women’s voices are still underrepresented.
This issue is felt further than simple statistics. Sandra Meilunaite, curator of and artist in our new exhibition BruocsellA, saw that the Fine Arts department she studied at was filled with mostly women students when she started out. But when it became time to graduate, the ratio of men was higher than ever. And even after attaining a degree, women are pushed to the sidelines.
K.L.8 has always striven for an equal approach to their representation of artists. But we have to go further and work towards an equitable approach.
BruocsellA will give a voice solely to women working and/or living in Brussels. The original name of Brussels, namely Bruocsella, proves with its -a declension that Brussels was female from the beginning.
But BruocsellA wants to go beyond the idea of women's rights. It is not meant to show that women are forgotten or “in a weaker position”. Women are more than social issues. BruocsellA focuses on the quality and subject of the artists, which goes beyond one issue. The curation leaves gender aside and focuses on the work itself and its strength in any capacity or context. Women are more than the obstacles they overcome. They are as complete as any human being, and their strength shows in the caliber and diversity of their work.
With work by Bo Vloors, Chloé Van Oost, Ilke Cop, Ines Thora, Justine Cappelle, Luth Lea Rose, Marjolein Guldentops, Mariia Dergacheva, Set Chevallier, Sofia Druzhinina, Sandra Meilūnaitė & Yasmine Jai.
SEA BREEZE
24 - 29 August 2021
For her exhibition at K.L.8, Cappelle will be showing works she has made over the years but has never brought together, which focus on the sea and sea-side. The subjects of her works often come from very personal experiences. Growing up in West-Flanders created a big fascination for the sea, where the works act as a way for her to deal with her past and the idea of “being home”. Cappelle deals with her fear of losing her home, a place to ground herself. These fears are materialized in the ebb and flow of the sea, washing away the past, destroying her memories, and leaving her with nothing.
While her video work will still be present, and often be the starting point of the installations, it will be the first time she has so extensively integrated other media in her presentations. An impressionistic documentary about the border between sea and land will be submerged underwater. Canvasses painted by the sea will be shown together with a video depicting the process of the paintings. Digital manipulations will be projected on an empty canvas, comparing painterly and digital manipulations. Rather than a fully-finished exhibition, this showcase will focus on the process and experimentations of an artist stepping outside of what she knows, looking for what her work could become.
—————————————
In her artistic practice, Justine Cappelle investigates the invisible and intangible and makes them perceivable and touchable. Concepts such as WiFi, Bluetooth, fragility, family, beauty, and aging are some of the abstract subjects that she has tackled in the past. While she has a background in film and documentary making, she hasn’t shied away from going beyond and creating art in all different media. Her main focus remains on the medium of video, which often has a surreal documentary feeling to them, but the objects she creates complement these investigations.
These subjects often remain on the periphery, and can sometimes be seen as banal. The wind, the sea, WiFi, all these things matter to us greatly but are hardly thought about or experienced. Cappelle has a great fascination with that which often remains unseen and gives importance to them through her work.
The matter of her movies is often very open-ended, but one can also feel a socio-political background in them. This is however not the main focus point of Cappelle, who more seeks to make the audience wonder and be aware instead of changing or imposing opinions. Through making the intangible tangible, it is not only technological or natural processes that solidify, but also their implications on our culture and society.
Through this process of materialization, the medium itself is also up for investigation and transformation. As the immaterial solidifies, it does so in the form of a medium. Cappelle looks for ways where the medium can contribute to the process of research and gelation. By doing so, the medium becomes more than what it is by itself. Art being more than the sum of its parts comes to the forefront here, where Cappelle makes the medium evolve or transform, so it can show a new side of itself or become something completely different.
Cappelle’s work has been internationally screened, at places such as Filmfestival Oostende, International Documentary Filmfestival Amsterdam, Festival International du Documentaire Émergent Paris & FIFA Montreal presented in the collection ‘something new’. Her movie “Margrave”, which will be on view at the show, also won the Grand Prix Tbilisi International Student Film Festival & Ensor best cinematography in a short film.
An Exhibition by Ines Thora
10 - 15 August 2021
For her exhibition at K.L.8, Ines Thora is showing a new parcours in her artistic practice which she is still intensely exploring. The elements she has used and created in her paintings over the past years are up for discussion in her latest works. Painted marks and pencil lines used to dictate her images, which are now being amplified or even traded for sewn elements that have recently been introduced in her visual language. The paint is slowly being replaced with the actual material of the canvas: fabric and thread. The “voids” she fills and creates in her work are still present, but gain a new appearance without losing the sensitivity and delicacy which draws us into her artistic world.
An Exhibition by Ines Thora invited you to come to see and discuss Thora’s new quest into her intrinsic world of painting.
—————————————
Ines Thora’s work is a direct translation of her abstract persona, a representation of her inner world as it comes to her while painting. As her work is formed by her feelings and intuition at the moment of creation, Thora doesn’t like to further explain her work to retain its universality. The language she uses attempts to convey that which cannot be verbalized, such as meditative atmospheres and the physical act of painting. It is a way for her to communicate, to make visible that which is intrinsically invisible. A way to react and interact with the world. The physical act of painting and the intangible sphere of the mind meet each other in the void of the canvas which she pulls forward and slumbers back beneath its surface.
These conflicting and hard-to-grasp concepts are what makes the work so compelling. Usually, Thora’s work gains a sense of diffusion, related to the work of Mark Rothko. Painted marks seem to float out off and recede back into the canvas. The image appears as if floating underwater or in the air. Recently though, the physical elements of the canvas are used and enhanced to make the physicality of the work more apparent. The coincidence of the paint itself, which was up until now so prominent in her work, has taken a backseat to allow the actual carrier of the painting to speak its story through its intuitive materiality.
Each painting is a fight with the void. Without humanity’s interference, the word of meaning would remain empty. Thora pulls the painting’s humanity from its depths, only for it to start to fade away again. Only now, the non-empty voids are stitched together and touched by an actual human presence.
Ines’ work has been shown extensively in Belgium, with exhibitions in Brussels, Aalst, Knokke, and Leuven.
State of Things
21 - 24 May 2021
State of Things is conceived as an installation in situ. A triptych of large scale canvases, painted during the past three months, is combined with an installation work and a couple of smaller paintings, tailored to this exhibition.
The title of the show has a double meaning: on the one hand it refers to an intermediate assessment Ilke Cop makes of her own artistic process, of which the dynamic was intensified by the persistent COVID-pandemic. Secondly, the title references the way in which the artist studies her own visual language. By constantly exchanging and varying images, Cop investigates how new images are born.
Vibrant colors and meandering landscapes lure the viewer into Cop’s world. It’s aworld where the relationships and structures that control our reality are heavily questioned. The images are rich with references to art history, well known places and loaded symbols. They allow the viewer to form a very personal relationship with the art works. The mental space is visualised through the use of Pre- Renaissance perspective, the inversion of the visual hierarchy and the adoption of diverse media to transform the physical space.
Textile is an important component of the installation, undoubtedly influenced by the artist’s background in fashion. The fabrics refer to the decorative function that is often assigned to women, even in today’s world.
The artist contrasts this limited vision of womanhood with the great attention to technique she applies to the art works and the conceptualisation of the show. She forces her person and her artistic process to take center stage : a clear attempt to break through the patriarchal structure.
The visitor meets the image of the female, but also the image of the artist. Her craft and physicality are palpable and so the viewer is invited to contemplate her face and body parts. These objects are all at once subjects and vice versa: the muse and the creator. Ilke Cop returns the surveying gaze and establishes the role of the female maker in all its vulnerability and long subdued strength.
—————————————
Ilke Cop (° 1988) lives and works in Brussels, Belgium. In 2010 she graduated as a master in the history of art, and the core of her ideas and vision took root. She runs a lauded and sustainable fashion brand (ILKECOP). By the end of 2018 she started her art practice. She is a member of the new writers collective for women Hyster-x.
In her work, Cop embraces both traditional oil painting techniques and art history to form a new visual language, rich with conceptual layers. The question on the position of ‘the female’ is always at the core of her practice.
beauty/?
18 - 24 July 2020
For their first exhibition at their new exhibition space K.L.8, Sandra Meilunaite and Dilum Coppens chose 23 artists to show work around the theme of “beauty”.
With the severe cultural budget cuts made in Flanders, they made the decision to open up their own artist-run exhibition space for young and beginning artists. And what better way to start everything off with a comment made by MP Peter De Roover, who reacted against the reaction of the cultural sector. De Roover claims that “we used to have artists who had a better eye for beauty”. Sandra and Dilum, however, do not believe so and went out looking for artists to show a very diverse vision on contemporary beauty.
And they sure did find it. From trashy to luxury, vague to direct, subtle to in-your-face, humane to mechanical, the show will be filled with as much aesthetics and visions as possible.
Ranging from figurative painting to experimental video and installation, 23 artists from Belgium and abroad were selected and will show work at the exhibition “beauty / ?”.
Beauty is when there is an investigation into the inner interest. The interest in everything our eyes can see or what our bodies can feel. The research materializes itself into an image, through the hands and minds of the various identities that are scattered throughout the world. When they come together, we understand that everyone's perspective is different - if you stand on one side of a box, you won't see the other side. The beauty comes into play when multiple sides are exposed, and there are no more boundaries.
With work by Aarnoud De Rycker, Alma & Brett Studhome, Annabel Claeys, Arthur Cordier, Claudia Holzinger, Dawn Woolley, Doménico CV Talarico, Florien Allemeersch, Francesca Mussi, Magdalena Hoffa, Mario Londoño, Matthias De Wolf, Myriam Gross Mall, Peter Troucheau, Roos van Geffen, Sandrine Deumier, Stef Lemmens, Stefan Klein, Stijn Van Hoof, Tshepo Moloi and Wouter Vanderstede & Peter Simon.
BETWEEN (STAGE)
24 - 28 August 2019
Neither here nor there. Somewhere. It is there that the works shown at "BETWEEN (STAGE)" are located.
The podium is at the front, the wings at the rear. But what is in between, between the curtain, between the two worlds?
Starting from this idea, Sandra Meilunaite, and Dilum Coppens invited five artists to show work together with them in their studio, which is transformed into the stage for "BETWEEN (STAGE)" for the occasion.
They choose artists whose work, for them, carries a deep connection with the mental “in-between space”, a space that is unknown to us, difficult to read, that seems strange but is not strange to us.
The works do not open easily, but have to be read patiently. They need time to unfold before the mind of the spectator, just like a play unfolds through time.
Opening on 23th of Augustus 2019, at 17h.
Open from 24th until 28th of August, from 11u until 18h.
With works by Sandra Meilūnaitė, Obed Vleugels, Naomi Süssholz, Ladis, Ines Thora, Dyllen Rubbens & Dilum Coppens
