'we refuse_d' brings together fifteen artists whose practices explore refusal, endurance, and action—asking what it means to persist, resist, and create under conditions of silencing, censorship, and displacement.

Developed through ongoing dialogue between artists and curators, we refuse_d is both a collective statement and a space for solidarity. It resonates with the spirit of the nineteenth-century Parisian Salon des Refusés, drawing attention to the fragile optimism and resilience that emerge in times of crisis.

Most of the works are new commissions, presented by artists who affirm the necessity of art as presence. Through the lens of refusal, their works trace paths of persistence, resistance, heritage, community, collective care, and repair.

Above all, 'we refuse_d' is an exhibition about life, persistence, and the necessity of making art.

Participating artists:

Jumana Manna, Barış Doğrusöz, Nour Shantout, Samia Halaby, Emily Jacir, Taysir Batniji, yasmine eid-sabbagh (with Tabara Korka Ndiaye and Ndeye Debo Seck), Khalil Rabah, Oraib Toukan, DAAR (Sandi Hilal, Alessandro Petti), Abdul Hay Mosallam Zarara, Majd Abdelhamid, Dima Srouji, Suha Shoman, and Walid Raad (with Pierre Huyghebaert).

Curated by Nadia Radwan and Vasif Kortun.

'we refuse_d' is produced by Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art, Doha, on the occasion of their 15th anniversary, and presented in partnership with M HKA.

M HKA presents a new site-specific installation and performance by Belgian multidisciplinary artist Stef Van Looveren as part of the IN SITU programme. The project treats the museum space as a hybrid of temple, body, and alchemical laboratory, focusing on material transformation—melting, merging, and mirroring—as a way to explore change as both ritual and embodied experience.

The performance OPUS II (17.01.2026) opens the exhibition and forms the work’s first chapter. Instead of encountering a completed installation, visitors witness a space constructed in real time through a ritualised procession in which performers carry and activate objects. This process establishes the spatial and symbolic framework of the exhibition, setting the logic that guides its later configuration.

At the core of Van Looveren’s vocabulary is a triad of sound-producing sculptural forms. Drawing on organ-like structures, egg and seed shapes, bell forms, and elemental vessels, these sculptures connect to alchemical ideas of matter as both physical and symbolic. Light interacting with silvered surfaces creates shifting reflections, while movement by performers and visitors abstracts figurative references and opens themes of life cycles, decay, and renewal. The installation loosely echoes the structure of a Tree of Life, suggesting an interconnected system of forms and energies.

The work invites visitors into an interior, introspective space where social conditioning can be questioned. Van Looveren describes this as a form of “shadow work,” exploring what remains when inherited roles and identities lose their hold. Alchemical processes—dissolution, transformation, reconfiguration—serve as metaphors for fluid identity, queerness, and the refusal of binary thinking.

References to cyborg bodies, androgyny, and intersex embodiments highlight the capacity for continual metamorphosis. Silvered bodies suggest medical, futuristic, and sacred resonances at once—part operation, part machine, part divine.

Sound functions as a structural element. The music operates like a mantra built on repetition, echoing cycles of life. The sequence begins with the artist’s voice—both vulnerable and identity-forming—linking sound to gender expression, healing, and power. The voice expands through bells, tuned objects, and live instruments.

Throughout the exhibition, materials shift and surfaces melt, keeping the installation in a state of flux. This reflects Van Looveren’s wider practice, which challenges fixed notions of the body and embraces continual transformation. The result is a space of ongoing becoming—open-ended, reflective, and grounded in the physical presence of bodies, sound, and materials.

A new durational performance, OPUS III by Stef Van Looveren unfolds slowly during the final hours of the exhibition, allowing the body, materials, and time once more to reshape the work in real time. The performance explores the idea of transformation using repetition and subtle gestures to blur the boundaries between ritual, endurance, and sculpture. Visitors encounter the piece at different stages, making each viewing a unique moment within an ongoing process rather than a fixed event.

Join the performance on 17.05, 15:00-18:00.

Designer Jelle Jespers examines graphic design and print as artistic practices in Argentina between 1940 and 1976. In this period, print culture became a vital space for ideas. Designers, artists and thinkers used printed matter to experiment with form, language, politics and society.

Antwerp played a surprisingly prominent role in this transnational exchange. The abstract forms developed by Georges Vantongerloo inspired the Argentine designer Tomás Maldonado in shaping a new modernist visual language. In the 1960s, the paths of Antwerp poet Paul De Vree and artist-publisher Edgardo Antonio Vigo crossed, both key figures in the field of visual poetry. From the 1970s onwards, artist Jorge Glusberg worked closely with Flor Bex and Antwerp’s ICC, from which M HKA emerged.

The catalogues, magazines, publications and posters gathered in this archival presentation show how graphic design evolved from a craft into a professional discipline. Typography and print became carriers of new artistic and social ideas. Nueva Visión tells a story of exchange, imagination and formal ambition across continents.

Curated by Jelle Jespers, in collaboration with Jan De Vree

Carla Arocha (b. 1961, Caracas, Venezuela) and Stéphane Schraenen (b. 1971, Antwerp) have worked together as an artist duo for over twenty years. Across sculpture, painting, photography and installation, they investigate how space, reflection and perception shape the act of looking. Their work calls for a critical way of looking.

The first gallery brings together their individual practices and early collaborations. Carla Arocha’s Screen (2005) consists of six suspended semi-transparent panels that function like a mobile, engaging light, movement and the viewer’s presence. Stéphane Schraenen’s Sleeping Room (1999–2024) is part of the series What I Don’t See at Night. In these abstract nocturnal cityscapes, darkness, colour and reflection intersect. The silkscreen print Persiana (2014) by Arocha & Schraenen evokes window blinds. Who is looking and who is being watched?

The new installation Landscape (Antwerp) (2026) occupies the circular gallery. Arocha & Schraenen have transformed the colour palette of an urban view into monumental fields of colour. Reflective structures capture light, colour and movement, projecting them back into the space. Architecture, environment and viewer become active elements in a continuously shifting experience.

With thanks to the artists, and in particular for the donation of Landscape (Antwerp).

In 2017, M HKA reopened after an extensive renovation, showcasing a permanent collection presentation featuring reference artists, contemporary icons, historical pioneers, and key figures from the museum’s global collection. The collection is ever-evolving, reflecting the dynamic times we live in. In 2025, M HKA will present a renewed, focused collection showcasing approximately 30 key works by Flemish artists.

Among them are figures who have lived and worked in the region—such as Marcel Broodthaers, Panamarenko, Luc Tuymans, Anne-Mie Van Kerckhoven, Otobong Nkanga, and Laure Prouvost—alongside artists with ties to Flanders, including Marlene Dumas, Jimmie Durham, Gordon Matta-Clark, and Nicola L. They are presented in dialogue with international artists from the Collection of the Flemish Community, including Cady Noland, Barbara Kruger, Michelangelo Pistoletto, Taus Makhacheva, and Hüseyin Bahri Alptekin.

The collection presentation takes the postwar avant-garde in Antwerp as its starting point, using the past as a platform to explore the multipolar realities of both today and the future, structured around the three key angles of the collection: image, action, and society.

In 2025, Dries van Elke won the Hugo Roelandt Prize with his graduation project in the Free Graphics and Drawing programme at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts Antwerp. M HKA invites him to create an INBOX presentation, on view during Antwerp Art Weekend.

"We often think of nature as the evercaring mother, and the rivers as the streams of love and nurture. But mothers are never perfect, that's why we are truly able to love them.

Rivers, to that extent, malevolent and sporadic — nothing kind about their existence. Often they decide what lives and what dies, and whoever is strong enough to get access to them will dominate.

River becomes a form of exclusion, a rupture, separating the banks and the inhabitants. Those blessed to be at the head will nurture on the clean drink, while those catching tails downstream will suffer from the microbes of the mouths of those who sipped the waters first. But exclusivity is unavoidable when it comes to mothers; if they had to share all their love between everybody, their children would ultimately be left unloved."

M HKA Museum of Contemporary Art is Antwerp’s museum for art, film and visual culture in the widest sense. Since 1987, M HKA has been housed in a converted warehouse in Antwerp’s South district, and possesses 4000 square metres of exhibition space devoted to art from 1960s to the present day. It offers a space of encounter for the public and the artistic community alike with contemporary art, bridging the international and the regional, culture and society, tradition and innovation, reflection and presentation.

The museum presents ambitious large-scale monographic and group exhibitions, and various other medium- and small-scale presentations, including displays of its collection. M HKA plays a leading role in Flanders, having developed an international profile built upon Antwerp's avant-garde tradition of the post-war era. It is a cultural-heritage institution of the Flemish community and possesses a world-class collection of contemporary art. Its house for film De Cinema is located at the cultural meeting point De Studio on Mechelseplein.