NW is an open house for contemporary art and film along the quays in Aalst. Working closely with artists, we offer an engaging, collaborative programme that pushes the boundaries of what art can be or do. Our focus is on artistic development with an eye on the city, the region, and the rest of the world – at the intersection of the local and the global.
As spring begins, NW reopens with Club Ritual, a communal gathering celebrating ritual as dance, transformation and dissent. The entire weekend is dedicated to old and new encounters, rituals, film focus programmes, workshops, listening moments and kitchen stories.
Exhibition programme 2024
March 23–May 26, 2024
Opening: Friday, March 22, 2024
Ritual in Transfigured Time
Artists: Carlotta Bailly-Borg, Gaëlle Choisne, Maya Deren, Darius Dolatyari-Dolatdoust, Onyeka Igwe, (LA)HORDE, Ula Sickle and Bárbara Wagner & Benjamin de Burca
The new NW is inaugurated with the opening exhibition Ritual in Transfigured Time, named after the 1946 short film of the same name by Maya Deren (Kiev, 1917–New York, 1961). Deren, whose life was driven by a desire for freedom, was a guiding light for us in devising the exhibition and film programme, as well as the principles of our revitalised organisation: dialogue, collaboration, experiment and the breaking down of boundaries.
The exhibition will be complemented with film programmes curated by Counter Encounters (Laura Huertas Millán, Onyeka Igwe, and Rachael Rakes) and Bárbara Wagner & Benjamin de Burca
Lucile Desamory: Untitledment
With the installation Untitledment, Lucile Desamory delves into the ongoing artistic question of emancipation and autonomy. The title alludes to the artist’s desire to create a terrain vague, a serene and fluid space delicately poised between emptiness and an autonomous zone.
Info~Angel presents itself
The first in a series of archival presentations chronicling Aalst’s progressive past and that of the wider Dender region.
June 16–September 8, 2024
Opening: Saturday, June 15, 2024
Guy Woueté: Bijoux Cailloux
Curator: Aude Christel Mgba
Bijoux Cailloux is a solo presentation of the Cameroonian visual artist Guy Woueté. Taking inspiration from the context of Njombé-Penja, a historically and politically loaded district in Cameroon, the exhibition addresses the issue of labour in our capitalist world through a scenography referencing the aesthetic of what could be a small market in Cameroon. The main installation within takes the form of typical commercial stands displaying and becoming artworks in progress themselves, realised over the past years. The stands articulate other more autonomous signs, forms and images deployed in the space.
The exhibition will be complemented with a film programme curated by Guy Woueté and Annabelle Aventurin.
The Constant Now
A group exhibition on the notion of labour by Günbike Erdemir, Souhaila Maalem, Diego Herman, Fatemeh Towhidloo, Brahim Tall, Diane Marie, Shen Özdemir, Fareed Aziz and Kapinga Muela Kabeya.
Autumn 2024
Opening: Friday, September 27, 2024
Bassem Saad: Century Bingo
Century Bingo is Bassem Saad’s first solo exhibition in Belgium, comprising a collage-installation bearing the same title, as well as the film Congress of Idling Persons (2022) and a series of lenticulars. The exhibition premiers a new film co-produced by NW and EMPAC based on the performance Permanent Trespass (Beirut of the Balkans & the American Century) created by the artist in collaboration with the author Sanja Grozdanić. Together, these artworks invoke different historical and geographic vignettes, offering a non-linear interpretation of history while engaging discrete moments of rupture and continuity.
Tom Hallet and Antonia Brown
In this duo exhibition, Tom Hallet presents three drawings combined with sculptures made from bundled branches and twigs. It has been alleged by some sources that in the Middle Ages, amid a shortage of branches and twigs, condemned queer individuals were tragically used as firewood, resulting in the derogatory slur ‘faggots’. Antonia Brown’s installation resuscitates and alters inherited forms of adornment worked through devices of transfiguration. The installation, dispersed through mirrors, pleats and soprano tones, adopts gestures of shattering and unravelling to conjure the ornamental as a form of refusal.
