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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
ECHO #1, October 2024
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
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ECHO #1
OPENING 12 October 2024 - 18h
13, 19 & 20 October - 13-19h
We took a break, now we're back. And we thought it was a great time to host a retrospective. We invited back 10 artists that we showed in the past, went out into the world, bounced around, and like an echo are now returning back to us.
What have these people been up to since they last showed work at our space? How have they continued, evolved, changed, morphed, grown?
Come discover their evolution on 12 October 2024 at 18h, or after on 13, 19 & 20 October, between 13h and 18h.
See you soon!
With work by Algolit, Arthur Cordier, Ash Bowland, Chris Dennis, Dilum Coppens, Justine Cappelle, Marija Rinkevičiūtė, Mathias De Wolf, Paulius Sliaupa & Rabten Tenzin.
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.