Willem Oorebeek: OBSTAKLES
February 1–April 27, 2025
WIELS presents OBSTAKLES, a major survey of Willem Oorebeek’s work. Since the early 1980s Willem Oorebeek (1953, NL) has been a prominent figure with an extensive presence in exhibitions, publications, and as a teacher and a mentor. He developed his practice in the Netherlands before moving to Brussels in 1994, where he has been living and working ever since. Over the past decades Oorebeek has explored the impact of images and the erosion of the viewing experience caused by the mass inflation of ‘print’ or ‘screen’ reproduction.
Spread across two floors, the exhibition highlights Oorebeek’s in-depth exploration of authorship and aura by way of appropriation techniques, selecting printed matter to manipulate and transpose into other media. At the core of Oorebeek’s work stands the human figure, serving as a vehicle to investigate the politics of the image, the allure of icons, and the humour and derision that arise from their overexposure in public consciousness.
Curator: Pauline Hatzigeorgiou
With the support of Mondriaanfonds.
Paulo Nazareth: Patuá/Patois
February 1–April 27, 2025
With Patuá/Patois, Paulo Nazareth presents a comprehensive retrospective at WIELS, highlighting more than two decades of artistic practice. Through two powerful symbols of survival and resilience, Nazareth explores the interplay of memory, language, and ritual in communities shaped by Afro-Brazilian, Indigenous, and anti-colonial struggles. The exhibition seeks to link to Brussels—a city where language and identity are central to social and political life.
Paulo Nazareth (old man, Brasil) lives and works throughout the world. His work is often the result of precise and simple gestures, which bring about broader ramifications, raising awareness to press issues of immigration, racialization, globalization, colonialism, and its effects in the production and consumption of art in his native Brazil and the Global South.
Curator: Fernanda Brenner
With the support of Mendes Wood DM.
Magical Realism: Imagining Natural Dis/order
May 29–September 28, 2025
Magical Realism follows The Absent Museum (2017) and Risquons-tout (2020) in a series of ambitious exhibitions at WIELS, inviting contemporary artists whose views challenge the norms of current aesthetics and discourse. Magical Realism reflects on an ecology that addresses both the aesthetic implications of our relationship with ‘nature’ at a tipping point; as well as the social, economic and scientific implications of exploring and shifting our conceptions of the planet.
Participating artists: Ade Darmawan, Adrián Villar Rojas, Ann Veronica Janssens, Anne Marie Maes, Annie Ratti, Barbara & Michael Leisgen, Bianca Baldi, Cecilia Vicuña, Daniel Steegmann Mangrané, Edith Dekyndt, Elizabeth A. Povinelli, Gaëlle Choisne, Joan Jonas, Jota Mombaça, Jumana Manna, Maarten Vanden Eynde, Marisa Merz, Minia Biabiany, Mountaincutters, Nour Mobarak, Otobong Nkanga, Pauline Julier, Saodat Ismailova, Precious Okoyomon, Suzanne Husky, Suzanne Jackson, amongst others.
Curators: Sofia Dati, Helena Kritis, Dirk Snauwaert
A chapter of the exhibition is organised in collaboration with argos centre for audiovisual arts.
With the support of Willame Foundation.
Everlyn Nicodemus
October 24, 2025–February 1, 2026
Whether it is through painting, collage, academic writing, curating, or poetry, Everlyn Nicodemus’ (b. 1954, TZ) work is rooted in a longstanding engagement towards art as a site for healing, forging counter-discourse, and exercising freedom.
This retrospective exhibition in WIELS delves into the breadth of a practice that always refused conformity and the “othering” frames of expectation shaped by the Western ethnographic gaze. Instead, Nicodemus approaches colour, texture and the form of the human body through a profound involvement with community organizing, communion and relationality.
Curator: Sofia Dati
In collaboration with the National Galleries of Scotland.
Nairy Baghramian
October 24, 2025–March 1, 2026
Recognised as one of the most influential artists today, Nairy Baghramian — who participated in WIELS’ very first exhibition in 2007 — returns to its distinctive architecture.
Known for her sculptures, spatial organisations, photographs and drawings, Baghramian develops a practice of fearless experimentation marked by historical and conceptual acuity. She works with forms, techniques and materials derived from an abstract repertoire, often arranged in contrasting combinations between the constructed and the casted, or the literal and the conceptual. Organic matter, elaborate craft techniques and architectural constructions are drawn into her work to investigate contemporary conditions of fabrication, of labour and its produce.
Curator: Dirk Snauwaert