Eine Stadt als Atelier
22 May to 19 July 2026
Opening: Thursday, 21 May 2026
Featuring contributions by Michael Van den Abeele, Chantal Akerman, Danai Anesiadou, Ethan Assouline, Sammy Baloji, Marianne Berenhaut, Kasper Bosmans, Jef Cornelis, Jos de Gruyter & Harald Thys, Laurent Dupont, Jana Euler, Arnaud Eubelen, Collectif Faire-part, Béla Feldberg, Mona Filleul, Gust Duchateau, Felix Kindermann, Aglaia Konrad, Stéphane Mandelbaum, Céline Mathieu, Hana Miletić, Shaun Motsi, Willem Oorebeek, Jurgen Ots, Marina Pinsky, Sophie Podolski, Emile Rubino, Chéri Samba, Michaela Schweighofer, Beat Streuli, Walter Swennen, and Angharad Williams.
Brussels is not a city of seamless processes. It is precisely through its imperfections, improvisations and prosthetic fixes that the city unfolds its singular, almost deranged energy. Alongside its dysfunctionality, the pervasive appropriation and reinterpretation of histories, spaces and objects shape the urban fabric. In Brussels, the permeability between urban life and artistic practice is unusually direct. What is encountered on the street finds its way into the work. Even the name Brussels, derived from Old Dutch and meaning “home in the swamp”, points to a soft, fermenting substratum from which new forms continually emerge.
Anyone living in Brussels is confronted with bricolage: car bodies wrapped in adhesive tape, buildings secured by makeshift means, peculiar shop windows. The makeshift leaves scars upon the urban body, which in turn generate their own form of permanence. Ad hoc structures establish themselves wherever responsibilities begin to fray: Brussels consists of nineteen municipalities, just as many mayors, a web of regional and national competences, historical lines of conflict, and monarchical representation. Set against the city’s fragile structural cohesion are the heavyweight presences of the EU and NATO. Since the 1950s, the European Quarter has undergone the kind of urban redevelopment for which the term “Brusselisation” was coined. The word now appears wherever history disappears under the pressure of new forms of expediency.
Read mohttps://koelnischerkunstverein.de/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Eine-Stadt-als-Atelier-EN-2.pdfre
Curated by Fabian Flückiger and Valérie Knoll
We are delighted that Eine Stadt als Atelier has been nominated for the *WESTSTERN Prize 2026 in the category Exhibition.
Image: Kasper Bosmans, Legend: Loot, Soil and Cleanliness, 2016, Courtesy The Artist
