Art Brussels

Galila Barzilai-Hollander

Galila Barzilai is a late bloomer, she started her collection of contemporary art 20 years ago at the age of 56, by a twist of fate, when she visited the fair Armory Show in NYC and literally fell in love with contemporary art. Since then, her thirst for discovering new talents has been unquenchable and she keeps travelling extensively to see and acquire new works.

Curiosity, eclectism, non-conformism, humor and intuition define Galila’s collection.

In 2019 in Brussels, she started to gather a selection of artworks in a space that embodies the collector’s enthusiastic mind: Galila’s P.O.C — Passion, Obsession, Collection.
Through an organic and intuitive layout never lacking humor, the collection exhibition Overdose is marked by passion, energy and an opening towards the world. Galila shaped it around her twenty favored themes, such as: money, eyes, books, chairs, cigarettes, watermelons, recycling and more sensitive topics dealing with Hitler, interfaith and religion. These subject matters, along with commissioned artworks to emerging artists from around the globe, make the collection autobiographical.

“A real collection is a self-portrait, a medium, an incessant exploration of who one is through the other – in this sense, collecting is for me like a psychoanalysis”.

Koi Persyn

Koi Persyn (b. 1996, BE) is the artistic director of Jester, a meeting ground for the development and presentation of contemporary art in Genk. His curated projects focus on process-based, experimental, collective and hybrid practices within site-sensitive exhibitions that investigate the social fabric of public and/or urban space. Persyn served as co-director (2023-2024) and curator (2021-2023) of Komplot in Brussels, and as project coordinator of Cas-co, a residency and studio organisation in Leuven (2022-2024). Simultaneously, he was active as a guest lecturer at La Cambre in Brussels and KASK in Ghent.

Persyn is co-curator and initiator of Publiek Park, a biennial exhibition project with a public program and publication in/for public parks in Ghent (2021), Antwerp (2023) and Brussels (2025). Together with Anna Laganovska, he curated Border Buda, an exhibition with temporary and permanent art commissions in the border area of Brussels, Vilvoorde and Machelen (2023-2024). In 2021, Koi Persyn, together with Laila Melchior, won the Lichen Curatorial Prize (as a laureate selected by CIAP and Curatorial Studies) and executed their exhibition proposal ‘Three Tropes for Entropy’ at CIAP in Genk (2022). Persyn worked as a mediator for the Belgian Pavilion at the 58th Venice Biennale as part of the Young Curators Programme (2019). He wrote for the art magazine Glean and resided in the advisory group of S.M.A.K., MSK, both in Ghent, and for the Platform Kunst In Opdracht, Flemish Government. He obtained a master’s degree in Fine Arts (2019), followed by a postgraduate degree in Curatorial Studies (2020), both at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Ghent. During his studies, Persyn initiated and co-curated a three-year residency programme at Het Paviljoen in Ghent.

Ariane Sutthavong

Ariane Sutthavong is involved in curating and research projects often at the intersection of art and politics. Her upcoming exhibition at Cloud Seven “Thresholds, doors, portals…” explores transient states, translations, and transformations through a selection of works from Frédéric de Goldschmidt’s collection alongside invited artists. Shifting between presence and absence, the familiar and the uncanny, the exhibition initiates encounters around circulation, memories, and identities, opening a space where new possibilities can emerge.

In 2023, she was a curatorial resident at Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo in Turin. Ariane has also delivered programmes and talks for the Asian Art Biennial, documenta fifteen, Bangkok Biennial, MAIIAM Contemporary Art Museum, Gallery VER and more. She co-founded (2020-2025) the inappropriate BOOK CLUB, an ongoing initiative centred around the collective reading and writing of texts supporting a third view of contemporary art in Thailand, beyond both the confines of the state and the interests of capitalism.