Art Brussels

Sunday 26 April
3 – 3:50 PM at the Tribune 

With Siemen Van Gaubergen (Art Contest 2024 laureate) and Léa Belooussovitch (artist, Meessen), moderated by Victor Hugo Riego

Meaning arrives through the backdoor of wordsand context. Consider the Dutch phrase “de wereld is door God geschapen”—”the world was shaped by God.” But if we misread or hear geschapen (shaped) as schaap (sheep), we get “God has sheeped the world.” A slip of the ear, yet revealing—humanity has been profoundly shaped by sheep, from wool to sacrifice, from pasture to metaphor. Language, too, is built on such fertile mishearings, where echoes breed new meanings.
This interplay extends beyond domestication. In 1783, Comte de Buffon classified birds of the New and Old Worlds, naming many parrots after their calls—human attempts to cage wild sound in syllables. But something curious happens when we trap these creatures: they begin mimicking us, throwing our words back in distorted echoes. This is a Janus-faced encounter—an exchange where naming is also being named, where the observer is always also the observed.
From a quantum perspective, true contact is impossible; only proximity remains. Particles, bacteria, and molecules drift between beings, blurring boundaries.
Someone recently told me Fishermen synchronize with their prey, rising and resting with the tides, their bodies learning the rhythms of the fish they chase. The word lovely portrays this symbiosis between fish and man, becoming more fish like, “fisher”, but never fully a fish.
God sheeped the world, and we’ve been grazing on the syllables ever since. From onomatopoeia as early tech to mishearing to the poetics of Almost, my work seeks to dwell in that nearness.
— text by Siemen Van Gaubergen

About the Speakers: 

Léa Belooussovitch 
Léa Belooussovitch was born in Paris in 1989. She lives and works in Brussels.
After obtaining a Master’s degree in Visual Arts, specializing in Drawing, from the École Nationale Supérieure des Arts Visuels de La Cambre in 2014, she joined several artist residencies in Brussels that launched her early career: the Fondation Moonens, the Fondation du Carrefour des Arts, and subsequently the M.A.A.C residency in 2017, at the end of which she held her first solo exhibition. Later that same year, she was invited to a residency at Bandjoun Station, the art center founded by artist Barthélémy Toguo in Cameroon. At the same time, her work was presented in Belgian institutions such as WIELS and ISELP, and she received several awards that established her on the Belgian and French contemporary art scenes: the Moonens Prize in 2014 and the Emerige Revelation Grant in Paris in 2016. In 2017, she was selected for the Art Contest Prize and won the COCOF Prize at La Médiatine in Belgium. She distinguished herself once again by winning the Prize of the Parliament of the Fédération Wallonie-Bruxelles in 2018, while also exhibiting in France in art centers such as Image/Imatge in Orthez.
Her work is included in both private and public collections, including the Belfius Collection, the Fondation Thalie, the Musée d’Art Moderne et Contemporain de Saint-Étienne, the Musée d’Ixelles, the Parliament of the Fédération Wallonie-Bruxelles, the FRAC Auvergne, the FRAC Île-de-France, and more recently the collection of the National Bank of Belgium.
In 2021, her work was presented at the Musée d’Art Moderne et Contemporain de Saint-Étienne as part of a major solo exhibition, accompanied by her first monograph dedicated to her felt drawing practice. In 2022, she took part in group exhibitions at CENTRALE and the FRAC Auvergne. In 2023, she was invited to group exhibitions in France (Centre culturel de Périgueux, Centre d’art H2M in Bourg-en-Bresse), in Switzerland, and in Belgian art centers (Le Delta in Namur, ISELP in Brussels). She also produced a new publication on her work and created a public artwork, projects supported and overseen by Wolubilis in Brussels. At the end of 2023, she inaugurated a solo exhibition, Lisières, at the Centre d’Art Contemporain Le Cellier in Reims, curated by Elsa Bezaury.
In 2025, she exhibited for the first time at Meessen Gallery in Brussels, and her work was shown at the Musée de l’Orangerie in Paris. In 2026, her work is presented at CaixaForum in Madrid and Barcelona, at the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Mons, and in Seoul, South Korea, at Gana Art Gallery. In November 2025, on the occasion of the tenth anniversary of the November 13, 2015 attacks, she was invited by the City of Paris to create a mural in tribute to the victims on a building in the 11th arrondissement. Her upcoming projects include exhibitions at the Fondation EDF and the Drawing Lab in Paris, as well as at the MUCEM in Marseille. 

Siemen Van Gaubergen
Siemen Van Gaubergen (1991, Belgium) is a visual artist whose work explores the porosity of language and representation through painting, video, text, and publishing. He runs the small-press initiative ALUBA press and cofounded the project space Pepper’s Ghost & Mennowski / Silhouettes.
He was a resident at Cas-Co, Leuven (2018–2022), and a participant at the Jan Van Eyck Academy, Maastricht (2022–2023), where he researched artificial climates and the relationship between language and technology.
Since 2025, he has been a resident at KULT XL, currently developing the video installation Glaciers Are Anachronistic and continuing the project Unplanned Parrothood. His work is held in private collections and the collections of M Leuven and GLUON.