Art Brussels

A work on growing up with technology, the construction of gender and sexuality as an individual in western society, Love Song is a film that investigates autobiographical narratives using auto- fiction, documentary, and essay. It’s framed by the makings of masculinity and its implications in made-up realities and narratives, flooded with explicit content and mediated exchanges.

Love Song was filmed between Munich and Dubai, connecting two points in space: the painting Der Arme Poet from 1839 by Carl Spitzweg, from the Neue Pinakothek Munich collection, made in the height of German Romanticism, and the artificial Love Lake in the desert of Dubai. Both painting and lake are used to explore the connections between Romanticism and Capitalism, and the binary systems they maintained, fostered by patriarchal discourses and religion, to question forms of production and the changes generated within Western societies.

“Love Song departs from my teenage years and an awareness of my body as a space where the interior and exterior are confronted and the layers they engender. The film takes the example of my parents, who dated mostly by correspondence, and the romanticised aspects of their interac- tions set in late 1960s fascist Portugal, between immigration (mother) and colonial war (father). Love Song deals with my subjectivity and the realisation of the changes that transform me as an individual and part of the collective.”

The film also tries to address the uses and misuses of the word “love” and how it is appropriated in neoliberal Western societies under an imminent collapse of social and natural systems.
The work gathers found footage along with the artist’s material, with both concise and scientific references as well as a poetic and personal tone. The research for the work had its starting point in the Romanticism period, which coincides with the industrialization of the West. The work challenges the binary formatting of Western narratives by presenting an alternative to the representations of intimacy, using a feminist perspective to speculate on the need to deprogram individual and collective imagination to generate new circuits of creation and discussion.

Courtesy the artist and Galeria Filomena Soares, Lisbon (booth 5D-12). 

The video work, Manual Labour, explores the questions posed by the transition into motherhood. Jumping through personal and shared memory, the work exploits the material and textural qualities of the medium. Reflected images, spoken elements and soaring sound reflect the complex layering of the process.

Her use of industrial materials and the physically robust within the introduced works connote mechanical fabrication and this is by no accident – her immediate family, her brother and uncle, were welders. Littered with biographical and gendered centric references – the repeated presence of cars, clothing, and subjects – her work unfolds discussions about identity and investigates the complexity of the body.

Courtesy the artist and Galerie Kandlhofer, Vienna (booth 6D-08). 

White Cloud / 白云, investigates mysterious white clouds, the promises of communication technologies and the lives of laborers whose work helps us see the world and yet remains outside of the visible grid. White Cloud is an emotional speculative documentary that offers one of the first looks into an equally mysterious and influential Rare Earth Element mining district. While questions related to geopolitics, ecology, capitalism, conspiracy and future scenarios circulate around the film, at the core is the testimony of a lonely miner attempting to embrace a dark and desolate landscape in search of a better tomorrow. Using generative audio and visual tools, Van der Auwera looks into the deep underbelly of these technologies and the rarely spoken relationship between the earth’s bowels and humanity’s outer space dreams. The film has an uncanny, slightly grotesque feel as emerging AI technologies show their own flaws. It was not despite, but exactly because of these flaws that Van der Auwera was driven towards the utilization of these tools when they first became accessible. This aesthetic is quickly disappearing, leaving us with an illusion of reality where what doesn’t exist is indiscernible from what does. And herein perhaps lies an aspect of the artist’s focus, providing us with critical resources to read the physical world as it vanishes before our eyes.

Courtesy the artist and Harlan Levey Projects, Brussels (booth 5C-41). 

The process of making a playground is the starting point for this reflection on the relationship between work and free-time, highlighting the hidden labour that underpins the production of culture. After Work follows the construction of the commissioned playground Tools For Imagination in South London and is a collaboration with artist and filmmaker Ben Rivers and poet Jay Bernard, who wrote and voiced the soundtrack.

It is intended to be viewed from Spatial Composition 13, a sculpture that functions as museum seating. Using the formal language of playground structures and (beach) loungers, it asks your body to remember how seating has shaped your encounters with art and culture.

Courtesy the artist and Galeria Vera Cortês, Lisbon (booth 5D-34). 

Contrary to the prevailing assumption that sleep is an expression of passivity and inertia, the video loop La Siesta (2023) by Mariona Berenguer reveals it to be an autonomous sphere of activity and a retreat from daily demands. Sleep does not contradict wakefulness, but rather is an extension and reorganisation of it, essential for maintaining our biological functions and strengthening social relations. The video shows how consciously and unconsciously experienced realities converge in the realm of dreams and how their interactions manifest themselves in the dreaming body.

Set in the liminal space between a vigilant mind and an exhausted body, La Siesta features an animalistic creature on the threshold of sleep. The camera remains tightly fixed on the restless movements of its eye. Neither fully opened nor closed, it seems to rush through information and emotions, absorbed in the fluid imagery of dreams. Indeed, during the phase of REM (Rapid Eye Movement) sleep, the brain is highly active, while the body remains paralysed to prevent it from reacting to subconscious stimuli. The eye marks a threshold between inner and outer worlds, turning inward as much as outward to grapple with the velocity and intensity of both lived and imagined realities. In this intimate space, the gaze of the camera seems to intrude like a voyeur, evoking a sense of unease and uncanniness. The artist likens the viewing experience to watching a film blindfolded—where events unfold beyond the field of vision yet deeply affect our perception.

The title, La Siesta, conjures the image of a nap on hot summer days, a fleeting moment of pause under stifling heat. Yet the nap is haunted by a soundscape of domestic noises—the hum of a dishwasher, the soft clicking of keyboards—that creep into the subconscious and stimulate its imagination. As the video loops endlessly, it reinforces the relentless progression of time, where rest and activity are inextricably intertwined. In this interplay, Berenguer crafts a dual narrative: one unfolding in the internal realm of dreams, the other in the ceaseless motion of their surroundings. Even in repose, we remain tethered to the world’s restless momentum.

Courtesy the artist and Galeria NAVE, Lisbon (booth 6D-07). 

Tales from the Source is a medium-length movie engaging a visual dialogue with the varied land of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and its ancestral narratives.

It offers a gaze on the landscapes of the DRC to translate a sense of its unfathomable power, diversity and knowledge.

The scenery is presented as a character acting as a living entity and inhabited by the symbolism of Congolese traditions. The visual approach borrows techniques from multispectral imaging, resulting in an otherwordly experience with surreal lights and colour.

Combined with an original musical composition by Bear Bones, Lay Low, we enter into a sensory dialogue with the landscape, an intelligent, ageless being in constant transformation that challenges our perception.

Courtesy the artist and Kristof De Clercq gallery, Ghent (booth 5E-20).