An Institution Is Not An Island, KASK & Conservatorium (2025)

An Institution is not an Island originated from an encounter with a deanery meeting room at KASK & Conservatorium. This room is often referred to as the ‘Malfait’ room, located on the first floor of the Pauli building. As part of a personal project by one of the previous deans, the room is filled with portraits and busts depicting central figures of KASK & Conservatorium’s history. With a portrait of former director Chantal de Smet by Anne-Mie van Kerckhove as the only exception, all portraits are of men.

Chantal de Smet wrote in a reflection on a decade of KIOSK that “an institution is not an island”, emphasising the importance for art students to be confronted with society and the broader responsibilities of art institutions – responsibilities that are always shaped by historical contexts. Which histories of KASK & Conservatorium are made visible within its current infrastructure, and which narratives are hidden, forgotten, or erased? How do we engage with and position ourselves in the layered histories and spatial politics of the school and the Bijloke site? If we consider the institution as soft power and space as hard power, in what ways might we be able to reclaim and engage with both on our own terms?

In The Production of Space (1974), Henri Lefebvre argues that space is never neutral. Spaces are designed, occupied and controlled, often favoring dominant ideologies. An Institution is not an Island has invited artists to intervene in KASK & Conservatorium’s spaces, much like how Lefebvre suggests urban space should be claimed by those who inhabit it. It offers an opportunity to question institutional, infrastructural, historical and spatial hierarchies and collectively reflect on spaces as sites of resistance and transformation.

Over the course of the past two weeks, four artistic interventions unfolded in the deanery meeting room, the attic and the Cirque auditorium, each one adding, removing, and disrupting elements of the spaces. Our aim was to (re)activate these different spaces, either existing in the margins or occupying the center of the institution, in ways that are reflective of and critical toward their history, current use, and imagined future. As bell hooks writes in Choosing the Margins as a Space of Radical Openness (1989): “Spaces can be real and imagined. The imagined ones are often the most powerful.”

Curators: Bethan Burnside, Flora Bonneure Vanclooster, Miranda Pastor, Maartje Claes, Tuta Chkheidze and Hanna Julia Erdosi.

Artists: Sanie Irsay, Nikolay Karabinovych, Celine Aernoudt and Lázara Rosell Albear.