Cultural Compass: Scandalous performance art, dialogue in Spanish art and witnessing through images

Every Sunday, Belga English picks its favourite events from the cultural agenda. This week: Opera Ballet Vlaanderen hosts one of the most provocative contemporary productions, the Royal Museums of Fine Arts in Brussels bring post-war Spanish art into dialogue with their collection and international artists ask us to question how we witness art through the lens of conflict.

SANCTA, 4 until 9 April, Opera Ballet Vlaanderen, Antwerp

"A feminist mass on roller skates" is how Florentina Holzinger’s production of SANCTA is described. Her trademark: groundbreaking performances with a strong show component that shed a feminist light on canonical works and social norms.

Starting from Paul Hindemith’s Sancta Susanna (1922), a once-scandalous opera about a nun punished for her repressed sexuality, Holzinger expands the work into something far more visceral and confrontational. She layers liturgical music with pop and metal, creating what she describes as a radical “mass celebration” that dismantles religious and artistic hierarchies alike.

In interviews, Holzinger emphasises the human body as a site of resistance, pushing performers to reclaim experiences historically marked by shame. The result is a physically intense, often provocative performance that confronts Catholic imagery and patriarchal structures without restraint. Rather than rejecting spirituality, SANCTA reimagines it through ritualistic empowerment.

Collection Meets Spanish Artists, 1 April until 16 August, Royal Museums of Fine Arts, Brussels

Collection meets Spanish Artists traces a compelling journey through post-war Spain, where art became a quiet yet powerful form of resistance. In the shadow of Francoism, artists such as Manolo Millares, Manuel Mompó, Manuel Rivera and Antoni Tàpies forged bold, experimental paths that broke with tradition.

Rejecting conventional representation, they embraced the raw language of Art Informel, working with burlap, metal threads and textured surfaces to express emotion and defiance. While some, like Millares and Rivera of the El Paso group, pushed material experimentation, others developed more personal, poetic visual worlds.

Pieces are placed dialogue with works from the Royal Museums’ collection and contemporaries such as Lucio Fontana allowing the exhibition to reveal a shared pursuit of freedom. The result is an intense encounter where abstraction becomes both a creative liberation and a subtle act of dissent.

Voor onze ogen (Before Our Eyes), until 23 August, Z33, Hasselt

Voor onze ogen (Before Our Eyes) turns looking into an urgent and ethical act. Bringing together a group of international artists, the exhibition explores how we witness a world shaped by conflict and how images can both reveal and obscure reality. At its core lies a simple but unsettling idea: looking is never neutral.

Many of the works respond to contemporary political violence, with particular attention to the ongoing devastation in Palestine. Rather than showing explicit imagery, artists often choose indirect or symbolic approaches, carefully balancing what is visible and what remains unseen.

This tension is central to the exhibition. In the portraits of Marlene Dumas, violence is not depicted but felt through the gaze of her subjects, while the work of Luc Tuymans takes a more unsettling turn: his monumental wall painting of a maggot appears to emerge from the surface, evoking violence as something ongoing and inescapable.

Across film, painting and installation, the exhibition continually asks: what does it mean to witness, and how do we respond? By shifting between presence and absence, Voor onze ogen challenges viewers to confront not only what they see, but also what they choose or refuse to see.

Abby & Friends, 3 April until 13 September, Abby Kortrijk

Three distinct exhibitions come together under one roof with Abby & Friends, each shaped by a different artistic voice yet united by a shared interest in identity, perception and storytelling.

At the heart of the programme is Coup de Théâtre. A Play of Clay, an exhibition that embraces transformation and theatricality. Working with clay as both material and metaphor, it explores how narratives are shaped, staged and reshaped, inviting visitors into a world where objects seem to perform and meanings remain fluid.

In Double Reality, artist Tom Callemin constructs a universe where fiction and truth blur into one another. His work often draws on cinematic language and personal mythologies, creating layered images that feel both intimate and strangely distant. The result is a dreamlike tension between what is seen and what is imagined.

Meanwhile, Authorities by Honoré d’O and Gerard van Lankveld turns its gaze towards systems of control and authorship. Through conceptual gestures and subtle interventions, the artists question who holds power in defining meaning, whether in art, institutions or society at large.

​​(MOH)

^{​#FlandersNewsService | ​ SANCTA © PHOTO NICOLE MARIANNA WYTYCZAK}

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