2022–2023 programme

Museum Dhondt-Dhaenens (MDD) continues its longstanding exploration of painting in relation to the natural environment and the complex legacies of modernism in Flanders. MDD’s 2022-2023 programme responds to its singular location, the semi-rural context that saw the emergence of the Latem Schools of painting in the late 19th and early 20th centuries and the museum’s own historic collection.

The “t” is Silent
June 26–October 2, 2022
As part of the 8th Biennial of Painting, MDD hosts The “t” is Silent curated by Gabi Ngcobo and Oscar Murillo. For Ngcobo, the artists in the exhibition “think through the medium of painting as a form of journaling—of working things through and of learning anew. They face history and the present by embracing “trouble” and a kind of “paining” that forces one to decide, in a time marked indecision.”

For most of the artists this will be their first showing in Belgium, and many of the exhibits have been made specifically for The “t” is Silent. With works by Anh Trần, Annabelle Agbo-Godeau, Brandon Ndife, Chemu Ng’ok, Dalton Paula, Donna Kukama, Francis Offman, Hamishi Farah, Jenny Montigny, Kerry James Marshall, Marcela Cantuária, Misheck Masamvu, and Oscar Murillo.

Commissions
From Summer 2022
Three commissions join the growing list of long-term installations at MDD. Lili Dujourie unveils the site-specific intervention Paragone (2022), which brings the flow of water directly into the museum’s foyer. In the restrooms, Yvan Derwéduwé’s Mirror Mirror (2022) celebrates the queer bond between art spectatorship, voyeurism and narcissism. In MDD’s gardens, Rirkrit Tiravanija’s teahouse, untitled 2018 (the infinite dimensions of smallness), gives way to a new sculpture by Meta Drčar, Frame Series, Work No. 10 (2022).

Antichambre
June 26–October 2, 2022
This ongoing series of displays presents a single artwork from a private collector’s lavatory. The third episode highlights the iconic Shaked shocked (1989) by Liliane Vertessen, an erotic self-portrait steeped in the artist’s trademark electric red.

Magali Reus
October 30, 2022–February 12, 2023
Reus occupies the entire museum with recent sculptures and photography that probe the uneasy interactions between inanimate and animate worlds. Her meditation on how nature is commodified, mythologised and consumed responds to MDD’s pastoral setting. The exhibition includes works from the museum’s collection selected and staged by the artist.

A̶r̶t̶e̶ fact
March 19–May 28, 2023
As the first survey of MDD’s collection in decades, A̶r̶t̶e̶ fact considers the ways in which the museum’s founders Irma and Jules Dhondt-Dhaenens constituted their collection from the 1930s to the early 1970s. Their choices offer a time capsule of collecting practices in Flanders, reflecting the passage from expressionism through abstraction to contemporary art.

Residency programme at Woning Van Wassenhove
Summer–Winter 2023
Every two years, MDD selects one or more residents to spend up to four weeks in the Woning Van Wassenhove, a unique post-brutalist villa designed by Juliaan Lampens. An international open call for applications from writers, in the broadest sense, with an interest in modernism and the built environment will be launched in November 2022.