Cultural Compass: Artistic highlights from 2025

28 December 2025

After a year filled with stirring operas, innovative exhibitions and societal engagement through art, Belga English presents the 2025 cultural highlights from Flanders and Brussels.

When We See Us, BOZAR, Brussels

This landmark exhibition at Bozar traced a century of Black figurative painting, foregrounding self-representation and everyday life across Africa and its diaspora. Curated by Koyo Kouoh, When We See Us brought together around 150 works by 120 artists, organised around themes such as joy, repose, sensuality and emancipation. Rather than centring trauma, the exhibition deliberately celebrated intimacy, pleasure and resilience, what Kouoh described as a “refusal of the gaze”. By drawing connections across generations and geographies, the show offered a powerful rethinking of Black modernities and their place within the global art canon.

Tiffany Alfonseca, Espero que ya le dijiste a tu madre de nosotras, 2020, © TIFFANY ALFONSECA

Khorós, Berlinde De Bruyckere, BOZAR, Brussels

Bozar hosted a major retrospective of Berlinde De Bruyckere, spanning 25 years of her sculptural practice. Drawing on Christian iconography, classical mythology and Flemish painting, Khorós explored vulnerability, suffering and hope through a contemporary lens. The exhibition placed De Bruyckere’s work in dialogue with figures such as Lucas Cranach the Elder, Patti Smith and Pier Paolo Pasolini, whom she considers artistic companions. A highlight was Arcangelo III, an imposing angel sculpture set on reclaimed wooden beams from Ghent’s historic Prinsenhof, linking personal memory to collective history.

Press opening of the exhibition 'Berlinde De Bruyckere. Khoros' in Brussels.
© BELGA PHOTO TIMON RAMBOER

Romeo + Juliet, Opera Ballet Vlaanderen, Antwerp

Choreographer Marcos Morau offered a stark reimagining of Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet, stripping away romance in favour of a world shaped by violence and inevitability. In this unsettling interpretation, love was fragile and constantly undermined by social forces, with the titular lovers reduced to metaphors embodied by two children. Morau’s distorted, almost frenetic movement language amplified the brutality embedded in both Shakespeare’s text and Prokofiev’s score, reframing the ballet as a meditation on destruction rather than devotion.

The Crystal Ship, Ostend

Ostend once again became an open-air gallery during the ninth edition of The Crystal Ship, Europe’s largest public art festival. Fifteen artists transformed the city’s walls with large-scale murals responding to the theme of Change. Alongside established names such as Fanakapan and Super A, the festival introduced emerging voices through an open call, adding fresh perspectives to the cityscape. With nearly 90 works now forming a permanent sculpture and mural route, The Crystal Ship continued to redefine Ostend as a hub for contemporary public art.

Transcripts of a Sea, Stephan Vanfleteren, MSK Ghent

In this deeply personal exhibition, Stephan Vanfleteren revealed five years of photographic engagement with the sea. Refusing the safety of distant observation, he immersed himself physically in the waters he captured, portraying the sea as volatile, seductive and inexhaustible. Shown in dialogue with artists such as Courbet, Ensor and Spilliaert, Vanfleteren’s work positioned the sea as both subject and obsession, continuing a centuries-long artistic fascination while asserting a distinctly contemporary, embodied perspective.

Stephan Vanfleteren. Transcripts of a Sea at the Museum of Fine Arts in Gent
©BELGA PHOTO KURT DESPLENTER

Fire, Villa Empain, Brussels

The Boghossian Foundation’s exhibition Fire gathered around 50 modern and contemporary artists to explore one of humanity’s most elemental forces. Across a wide range of media, the works examined fire’s dual nature as both creative and destructive, intimate and catastrophic. From hearths and candle flames to wildfires and ritual blazes, the exhibition traced how fire has shaped myths, memories and material culture across civilisations, underscoring its enduring symbolic and sensory power.

Michiko Van de Velde © PHOTO SILVIA CAPPELLARI

Ali, La Monnaie, Brussels

This new opera told the true story of Ali Abdi Omar, who fled Somalia as a teenager and reached Brussels alone after a perilous two-year journey. Developed in collaboration with Ali himself, the work transformed his experience into a searing reflection on migration. Blending symphonic music with electronics and percussion, the score mirrored the shifting landscapes of his journey. Beyond the personal narrative, Ali confronted the structural injustices governing global mobility, making visible the stark imbalance between those free to travel and those forced to flee.

Magritte. La ligne de vie, KMSKA, Antwerp

This exhibition revisited René Magritte’s rare 1938 lecture La ligne de vie, delivered at the KMSKA, as a key to understanding his artistic philosophy. By retracing the evolution of his ideas between 1927 and 1938, the show allowed Magritte to act as his own curator, selecting works that reflected his thinking during his most formative decade. It also highlighted his role as a connector between the Surrealist circles of Brussels and Antwerp, revealing how his poetic transformations of the everyday reshaped modern art.

^{© BELGA VIDEO TIJS VANDERSTAPPEN}

The Congo Panorama 1913. Colonial illusion exposed, AfricaMuseum, Brussels

This exhibition critically re-examined the Congo Panorama, a centrepiece of Belgium’s colonial propaganda at the 1913 Ghent World Exhibition. By placing the panorama in dialogue with Congolese and Belgian voices long excluded from the narrative, the AfricaMuseum dismantled the illusion of a benevolent colonial project. Archival materials, testimonies and contemporary artistic responses exposed what the original spectacle concealed: violence, exploitation and resistance. The result was a powerful counter-narrative that connected historical misinformation to the mechanisms of propaganda still at work today.