Season 2026 - 2027
Editorial
For almost 25 years, MACS has pursued an exhibition and acquisitions policy that combines an interest in the international art scene with a commitment to discovering and promoting artists working in the Wallonia-Brussels Federation.
In keeping with this commitment, our new season’s programme includes two exhibitions that opened this summer and remain on view: Aux choses mêmes, devoted to Lucia Bru’s sculpture, and Le Regard éloigné, centred on the Museum’s collection and including works by Johan Muyle, Marcel Berlanger, Emmanuelle Quertain, Michaël Matthys, Olivia Hernaïz, Alexis Gautier and Jot Fau.
The Museum has also joined forces with Botanique to present, at the end of 2026, works by some fifteen artists from the Wallonia-Brussels Federation, with a particular focus on the generation that emerged in the 1980s. The exhibition, entitled Un équilibre temporaire and conceived by Jérôme André and Grégory Thirion, explores the theme of instability – a concept that aptly characterises a world now beset by overlapping political, economic, energy, climate and health crises.
In spring, the programme will continue with Lady Mechanic, a monographic exhibition devoted to Charlotte Beaudry’s striking figurative painting. An accomplished artist, Beaudry explores subjects ranging from post-punk culture and the urban landscape to eroticism and gender studies.
Finally, reflecting its international outlook and commitment to transdisciplinary art, MACS presents two projects centred on dance: Belle-Île by Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker and Steven Fillet, which opens the season, and Why Don’t You Dance? by Iranian artist Hannah Darabi, which brings it to a close.
Featuring several performances of the new solo Amnesia, created by De Keersmaeker specifically for MACS’s long gallery, the first project grew out of a slow ‘dance-drawing’ performed outdoors by the two artists at the edge of a cliff on Belle-Île-en-Mer, off the coast of Brittany, in 2024.
The second, meanwhile, uses documentary photographs, archival montages and video performances to present popular dance in Iranian society as an extraordinary means of individual emancipation and collective resistance, with an unexpected detour via the Iranian diaspora in Los Angeles and the legendary nights at Cabaret Tehran.
Otherness in Le Regard éloigné, ecology in Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker’s dance facing the ocean, the systemic crises addressed by the curators of Un équilibre temporaire, the feminist stance of Lady Mechanic, and Hannah Darabi’s project, inspired by the 2022 protests of the Woman, Life, Freedom movement in Iran: taken together, these strands of our season’s programme show just how deeply artists engage, through their practices, with the pressing issues confronting a world threatened by the resurgence of religious and economic forms of obscurantism.
Denis Gielen
Director of MACS
