Cultural Compass: Magritte's Surrealism, Palestinian Circus School and haunting paintings
Every Sunday, Belga English picks its favourite events from the cultural agenda. This week: The KMSKA revisits René Magritte's groundbreaking lecture on how he saw the world, the Palestinian Circus School fuses performance and community as it tours Belgium and a woman's art outlines her deeply rooted trauma.
Magritte. La ligne de vie, until 22 February, KMSKA, Antwerp
In 1938, René Magritte stood before an audience at the KMSKA in Antwerp to deliver La ligne de vie (The Lifeline), a rare lecture in which he unravelled his vision of reality and the origins of his art. More than a talk, it was a revelation of how the Belgian Surrealist saw the world: where the ordinary becomes extraordinary and the mysterious hides in plain sight.
The new exhibition, named after Magritte’s lecture, revisits that pivotal moment. Here, he assumes the role of curator, selecting works that echoed through his lecture and tracing the evolution of his thought between 1927 and 1938, his most defining creative decade. The show also celebrates Magritte’s role as a bridge between the Surrealist circles of Brussels and Antwerp, linking him to figures such as Marcel Mariën and Léo Dohmen.
As Magritte once described, “The fire ladder gave me the privilege of experiencing what the first men felt when they made fire by rubbing two stones together. In turn, I made flames with a sheet of paper, an egg and a key.” Through such poetic imagery, he revealed an art of transformation by turning the everyday into a spark of wonder.
SARAB, until 30 November, various locations in Belgium
With SARAB, the Palestinian Circus School brings a poetic and physical performance to stages across Europe. Created in 2017 and reworked last year, SARAB, meaning “mirage” in Arabic, offers more than a traditional circus act: it is a powerful artistic reflection on hope, resilience and the human face of displacement.
In this captivating show, five Palestinian performers depict the experiences of refugees, balancing pain and strength. “With acrobatics, movement, and visual language, they portray the vulnerability and strength of people on the run,” the troupe explain. At a time when refugees are too often reduced to statistics, SARAB restores their individuality and humanity through art.
Founded in 2006 by Belgian Jessika Devlieghere and her Palestinian partner Shadi Zmorrod, the Palestinian Circus School uses circus as a tool for empowerment and expression, reaching hundreds of young people across Palestine each year.
In the summer of 2024, 20 young Palestinian circus artists collaborated with Belgian performers to create new work in Belgium, after a previous exchange in Palestine was disrupted by the ongoing bombardment.
The Belgian tour will make stops in Molenbeek, Aalst, Leuven, Heist-op-den-Berg, Antwerp, Diest and Ronse. As one of the organisers notes, “They start juggling and they understand each other. The Palestinian kids are in an isolated situation, by coming to Belgium they get a broader view of the world and they feel that they are not alone.”
Monique Gies - Inside Views, until 19 April, Museum Dr. Guislain, Ghent
In 1977, at the age of 43, Monique Gies abruptly left her family and comfortable life in Strasbourg for a small room in Paris. There, over the course of a single year, she created around a hundred haunting paintings. Depictions of muted interiors filled with dolls, rocking horses and ghostly domestic spaces covered canvas after canvas. Painted mainly in brown and pink, her canvases seem almost devoid of people, yet they radiate a suffocating emotional presence. Dolls without heads or limbs, enclosed in boxes or bottles, evoke a world of silence where the invisible becomes painfully tangible.
Gies began painting in an attempt to keep herself out of a psychiatric hospital. During this period of psychoanalysis, the repressed memory of sexual abuse by her uncle resurfaced. Decades later, in 2021, she finally spoke about the trauma that had haunted her life, shedding light on the meaning behind her art.
With dreamlike and surreal overtones, her work transforms personal anguish into a stark visual language of memory and survival of the enduring void of childhood trauma, thus turning her pain into art.
Brussels Art Film Festival - BAFF, 12-16 November, Brussels
Next week, Europe’s capital will pulse to the rhythm of the Brussels Art Film Festival (BAFF), Belgium’s only festival devoted entirely to documentaries on art and artistic creation.
This year’s edition presents 33 films from around the world, exploring the full spectrum of artistic expression, from painting and architecture to dance, photography and performance. The festival opens at Palace with La Guitarra flamenca de Yerai Cortés by Spanish rapper C. Tangana, and closes with Igor Bezinović’s satirical Fiume o Morte! Four prizes will be awarded by a jury at the conclusion of the festival.
Highlights include 18 Belgian films, an international panorama and a special Spanish focus in collaboration with Europalia. Screenings will also take place in Mons, Antwerp and Mechelen.
Ongoing events
Antwerp
Women’s Business / Business Women
Donas, Archipenko & La Section d'Or: Enchanting Modernism
GIRLS: On Boredom, Rebellion and Being In-Between
Eugeen Van Mieghem: City in Motion
Early Gaze: Unseen Photography From the 19th Century
Danial Shah: Becoming, Belonging and Vanishing
Brussels
Brussels, la Congolaise
Loisirs-Plezier: Brussels 1920-1940
John Baldessari: Parables, Fables and Other Tall Tales
MAURICE: Tristesse et rigolade
FireLuz y sombra: Goya and Spanish Realism
Ghent
Beauty as Resistance
Fairground Wonders
Stephan Vanfleteren: Transcripts of a Sea
Marc De Blieck: Point de voir
(Un)Shame
Hasselt
Rococo Reboot
Michael Beutler
Kortrijk
Rekindling
Leuven
Ecstasy & Orewoet
Grace Schwindt: A History of Touch
(MOH)
#FlandersNewsService | A performance by the Palestinian Circus School in 2007 © PHOTO JEAN AYISSI / AFP
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