HORNU.- The White Cube is Never Empty is the first solo show in a Belgian museum by Spanish artist Cristina Garrido. Spanning the past decade of her practice, it includes a new site-specific installation that responds directly to the Museum’s distinctive architecture and exhibition history.

Garrido’s multidisciplinary work examines how art is framed – culturally, digitally, and institutionally. Recurring themes in her practice include the relationship between art and cultural narratives, the impact of technology, and the role of viewer subjectivity. The exhibition offers a critical lens on the evolving dynamics of the contemporary art world.

It invites viewers to consider how identity and context shape artistic production and reception. Garrido probes the complex interplay between artists, their cultural backgrounds, and the systems that mediate visibility and value – interrogating how meaning is constructed within the global art ecosystem. Her work also explores the influence of digital culture, particularly how social media alters the circulation, interpretation, and authorship of art.

Her new installation expands these inquiries by engaging with the Museum’s architecture, its curatorial history, and the collective memory of its visitors. Drawing on her research into anamorphosis – a visual technique that distorts images based on the viewer’s perspective – Garrido incorporates archival photographs from past exhibitions to create optical illusions that reintroduce ghosts of earlier artworks into the space. This immersive work deepens her exploration of memory, time, and authorship, while reflecting on the Museum’s evolving role in shaping art history.

In English, Demonyms Are Capitalised (2025)

In English, Demonyms Are Capitalised reveals how nationality shapes our perception of artists and their work. Cristina Garrido points to the clichés that arise when an artistic practice is tied to a geographical origin. By compiling nationalities and art related terms, the series draws attention to these often reductive labels, rooted in a dominant Western perspective. In the context of the globalisation of art, do such classifications truly help us understand a work, or do they instead hinder its interpretation?

Local Color is a Foreign Invention (2020-present)

Each work in the Local Colour is a Foreign Invention series is composed of fragments of skies taken from paintings ranging from the sixteenth century to the present day. Selected from various European museum collections, these sky fragments are arranged like a Pantone colour chart, each accompanied by a caption specifying the artist’s name, the title of the painting, and its year of creation. The original works share a common theme: they depict cities and countries that were major cultural and artistic centres, such as London, Paris, Madrid, the Netherlands and Belgium. The title draws inspiration from the ideas of Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986), who denounced the obsession with ‘local colour’ in national literatures. Local Colour is a Foreign Invention questions cultural appropriation by examining the ways in which Western artists conceive of and depict foreign places. In the current context of globalisation, the work also takes the form of a map tracing the many points of intersection between the global and the local. Through this palette of colours, Cristina Garrido takes us on a journey through time, space and the history of art.

The Social Life of ‘Untilled (Liegender Frauenakt)’ (2016)

The concrete sculpture Untilled (Liegender Frauenakt), created by Pierre Huyghe, depicts a reclining woman whose head has been engulfed by a beehive. By merging the living and the inanimate, this evolving work questions the very notion of sculpture itself. To create her piece, Cristina Garrido carried out research on Instagram (using the hashtag #pierrehuyghe) and gathered 684 photographs of the sculpture taken by visitors in various exhibition spaces. Edited into sequences, these images reveal the ‘social life’ of an artwork shaped by the gaze and the sharing practices of its viewers. This project underscores the diversity of contexts in which artworks are displayed and shows how their ‘life’ extends and evolves according to the customs and habits of the digital realm.

Venice from London – London from Venice (2024)

In line with the Local Colour is a Foreign Invention series, the work Venice from London – London from Venice (2024) presents a cross-view of two cityscapes reproduced on postcards. On one side, The Thames from the Terrace of Somerset House towards Westminster (1750–51) by the Venetian painter Canaletto; on the other, Venice, View from the Giudecca Canal (1840) by the London artist William Turner. The visual displacement is twofold. London was painted by the most renowned painter of Venetian views, and Venice by the quintessential English Romantic artist. Each painting thus portrays the city of the ‘other’, while bearing the imprint of its creator’s relationship to the landscape of his own origin — a reminder of how our surroundings shape the way we see.

Paragraphs on Make-Up Art (2022-2025)

Paragraphs on Make-Up Art brings together two seemingly distant worlds: YouTube make-up tutorials and Sol LeWitt’s celebrated 1967 essay Paragraphs on Conceptual Art. To create this video, Cristina Garrido assembled sequences featuring internationally renowned make-up influencers and, with the help of artificial intelligence, altered their audio content. While their voices and intonations are preserved, their words have been replaced by the American artist’s famous text. As the video unfolds, the faces are gradually transformed, reshaped by the application of creams, powders and other artifices. Removed from their original context, these fragments, reworked by the artist, take on a hypnotic intensity and a visual quality reminiscent of a painting in motion. Beyond the contrast between image and text, Cristina Garrido draws a parallel between the codified gestures of make-up application and Sol LeWitt’s precise instructions, underscoring the methodical nature of a practice carried out by these ‘content creators’, who seem culturally and aesthetically far removed from conceptual art.

An Unholy Alliance (2016)

This project examines how art magazines distribute space between advertising and editorial content, by comparing the number of pages assigned to each. The shredded pages of each magazine are then reassembled into two spherical volumes, hand formed using a papier- mâché technique and displayed beside the spine of the corresponding magazine. This three-dimensional representation makes it possible to visualise the proportion and tension between two interdependent, often intertwined worlds — echoing the title of the work, An Unholy Alliance. The installation consists of six pairs of objects, each corresponding to a different art magazine.

To Whom It May Concern (2013)

This monumental reproduction, painted in acrylic directly onto the museum wall, depicts a letter of recommendation attesting to Cristina Garrido’s professionalism. Written by one of her former employers in London — a company specialising in the creation of luxury goods — the letter praises the artist’s qualities during her time as an assistant at various trade fairs. While the letter emphasises her professional skills, it makes no mention of her artistic practice. By transposing this document into painting, Cristina Garrido interrogates the relationship between these two statuses: on the one hand, that of a collaborator in the luxury sector, and on the other, that of an artist. To Whom It May Concern forges a tangible link between these two spheres, while exposing the imbalance in how they are recognised within the professional world.

Colored (2022-present)

In the Colored series, Cristina Garrido applies acrylic paint to black- and-white photographic reproductions of works from the avant-garde movements of the 1960s, particularly those associated with conceptual art. Through this gesture, she offers a critical reflection on the use of photography which, through its apparent objectivity, revealed this now- historic generation’s desire to dematerialise art. These standardised silver prints, distributed by museums, helped to establish a supposedly neutral aesthetic that was nevertheless imbued with ideological and normative implications. By reintroducing colour—dismissed at the time for its decorative or ‘feminine’ associations—Cristina Garrido restores subjectivity to the heart of art history.

Aerial Photography Does Not Create Space but Registers Surfaces (2016-2025) Reactivated with each new presentation, the installation Aerial Photography Does Not Create Space but Registers Surfaces comprises a collection of photographs gathered by the artist from the Instagram accounts of some thirty exhibition curators around the world. In this project, Cristina Garrido set out in search of an image that might capture the essence of their profession. On most of their Instagram pages, she noticed a recurring motif: photographs of the sky taken through an aeroplane window. For the artist, these images evoke the early days of photography and, with a touch of humour, the romantic cliché of the ever-travelling curator. By arranging this set of images across different carriers, she turns their authors into ‘artists’ while assuming the role of ‘curator’ herself, creating a true exhibition within the exhibition. The dominant blue hue evokes the atmosphere of airlines or airport waiting areas, creating the illusion of works suspended — as if dematerialised — within the exhibition space.

#JWIITMTESDSA? (Just What Is It That Makes Today’s Exhibitions So Different, So Appealing?) (2015-2018)

The title of the work refers to British artist Richard Hamilton’s celebrated 1956 collage Just What Is It That Makes Today’s Homes So Different, So Appealing?, composed of images taken from American magazines. An emblematic work of Pop Art, it epitomises an era that witnessed the rise of mass consumption and the legitimisation of contemporary art through the media — cinema, advertising, and beyond. Between 2011 and 2015, Cristina Garrido compiled a database of more than 2,500 photographs of international exhibitions, gleaned from art magazine blogs, gallery websites and social media. From this visual analysis, she identified 21 recurring categories — motifs, materials and modes of presentation — including plants, monoliths, crumpled objects on the floor and square screens, revealing a certain aesthetic standardisation. This collection served as the starting point for a series of interviews with thirty-six cultural practitioners — artists, curators, critics, gallerists, art historians, and others — who were asked about the power dynamics surrounding digital technologies and their impact on contemporary creation. Is there genuine democratisation? Who controls these tools of legitimisation? What role do institutions play?

The Copyist (2018-2025)

The Copyist is a performance work first realised in 2018. For its first activation, Cristina Garrido invited Román Blázquez, an authorised copyist at the Prado Museum, to paint views of a contemporary art exhibition at the Museo Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo in Madrid. Instead of reproducing old masters, the painter’s task was to document the display of the works in the manner of a photographer. Through this shift, Cristina Garrido opens a dialogue between traditional painting and contemporary art, turning reproduction into a creative act. The Copyist thus questions the value of the original and its representation, while emphasising the role of the copyist as both a privileged observer and a mediator between the exhibition space and the public. By blurring the boundaries between archive and creation, the performance invites us to view scenography as an artistic object in its own right. For her exhibition at MACS, Cristina Garrido enlisted Belgian copyist Daniel Cooreman to paint views of her exhibition according to a predetermined schedule.

Best Booths (2017)

The Best Booths collage series presents various gallery stands from art fairs around the world. These 'spaces,' which she cuts from book reproductions and grafts onto photographs of museum interiors, were previously designated as 'best stands' by platforms such as Artnet and Artsy.

Déjà-vu – Salle Pont, MACS, Grand-Hornu, (2002-2025) (2025)

This in situ installation revisits the history of exhibitions held at MACS since its founding in 2002, through a selection of photographic documents drawn from the museum’s archives. Taken by photographers Isabelle Arthuis and Philippe De Gobert, who are regularly commissioned by the institution for documentary assignments, these images have been distorted to create anamorphoses and reinserted into the very locations where they were originally taken, underscoring the importance of place and perspective in the processes of memory and its narratives. To explore this, Cristina Garrido selected eight exhibition views — Patrick Corillon. Les Pensées Poissons (2005), Le Tableau des éléments (2005), Bernd and Hilla Becher. Typologies anciennes (2006), Angel Vergara. Portraits (2007), Des Fantômes et des Anges (2007–2008), Le Fabuleux Destin du quotidien (2010), and Haim Steinbach. Objects for People (2025). Among them, De toutes pièces (2017) holds particular significance: a monographic exhibition that MACS devoted to Philippe De Gobert — usually the museum’s exhibition photographer, but presented on this occasion as an artist.