To open Kunstenfestivaldesarts, WIELS presents Belgian artist Sven Augustijnen’s new project around his feature film Spectres. Augustijnen has gained national and international recognition for his films describing the cultural specificity of familiar places, such as the Royal Park or the Mont des Arts neighbourhood, both in Brussels. Renowned as a subtle chronicler of the city, Augustijnen here establishes a link between its current vocation as administrative capital of Europe and its colonial past. This documentary film essay recalls one of the darkest chapters in the decolonisation of the Belgian Congo: the assassination of Patrice Lumumba, Congo’s first democratically elected prime minister.

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This year’s group exhibition “Speech Matters“ gathers 19 artists and refers to Denmark’s longstanding reputation of freedom of speech and issues the state of civil liberties in a time where censorship is on the rise. Hence, the show picks up a – not only within Denmark – highly controversial topic and explores how artists question the borders of freedom of speech and expression in their works.

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I’ve always worked in a crawl space, that’s a recurrent thing in my life, working under houses. Some things nobody is going to do for you, that goes even if you got money to throw at it and I do. I only need a little light to work. I do what I need to do. I get down on my gut and get down to work in the dirt, I wear half a shirt on the bottom of my face. I make my own space, I don’t work hard I work smart, I get high, I brick myself in and get high, I get by. What do you think I think about? I just, I close my eyes and throw mortar between the stones with a trowel.

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Under the title “Published by De Vleeshal”, the London-based collective Åbäke creates a dialogue between various locations of books in the town of Middelburg (Netherlands). Apart from De Vleeshal, the exhibition sites are the Province of Zeeland library, the bookshop De Drvkkery and the second-hand bookshop De Boekenbeurs. Åbäke investigates the social dynamics of books – the places where they can be borrowed, purchased, repurchased or looked at, as well as the stories contained in them and the links they create between people. The aim is to discover the collective dimension of books, at the threshold between the private and public spheres.

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