This survey of Nástio Mosquito’s work from the early 2000s to the present begins, before it begins, before it begins. This cascade of overtures starts in the entrance hall of M HKA, which doubles as a reading room. In front of one of the bookshelves, a small cubicle monitor sits on a plinth: it shows Mosquito delivering a speech in the Senaat, one of the two chambers of the Federal Parliament of Belgium. Partly because he is wearing a dark gray shirt and Malcolm X glasses, but mainly because of his charismatic voice and comportment, Mosquito evokes a long line of great Black orators from Frederick Douglass to James Baldwin, as he switches between booming and almost whispering. It’s as if different registers of speech—the serious and the comical, the authoritative and the offensive—have been chopped up and mixed into a salad of address. He offers casual salutations that range from the N-word to “Ladies and Gentlemen.” After discussing the temptation to cite John F. Kennedy, he does so. Performative self-contradiction is the foundation of his act. It becomes clear that Mosquito is also tapping into a long line of great Black tricksters, from Anansi to Richard Pryor. His puns …

After years of close friendship and close reading of each other’s work, Liam Gillick and Lawrence Weiner have finally made an artwork together. “A syntax of dependency:” occupies the first floor of the M HKA in Antwerp—a sort of indoor park interrupted by square columns and large wall openings from one room to the next. Nothing is on display here, at least not in the traditional sense: the only thing the artists have done is to give new flooring to this 1600 m2 space. Stretching out before the visitor like a strange empty basketball court, its wall-to-wall parallel strips of colored linoleum—red, yellow, black, white, gray—are covered sporadically with hints for the rules of the game played here: “That what / sets the stage / for what”; “Folded within itself”; “Outside of any given context.” Those rules—and that is the catch indicated by the title—are never absolute. Nothing exists without help, support or resistance; it’s one great endless syntactic connection. Different meanings and interpretations walk hand in hand, creating chains of causality and possibility, chains that are as easily broken as created. It is certainly no coincidence, for example, that the colors of the Belgian flag (black, yellow, red) are prominent …