KORTRIJK.- With Abby & Friends, Abby emphatically positions itself as an open house that collaborates, invites and connects. Every spring, the Kortrijk museum invites befriended art organisations to help curate a programme that brings together different voices, perspectives and working methods within a single museum visit. The result is not a sum of separate presentations, but a layered and polyphonic parcours in which three exhibitions complement, challenge and deepen one another.
For this first edition, Abby welcomes two partners, each with a distinct position in the contemporary arts field:
• Be-Part is a leading platform for contemporary visual art in South-West Flanders and acts as a laboratory for the creation and presentation of new art in Kortrijk and Waregem.
• Wit.h stands alongside artists who identify as Crip for activist reasons and who deviate from what is often considered normal, appropriate or recognisable.
Abby & Friends starts from the conviction that a museum today is not only a place where art is displayed, but also a space where partnerships become visible and where diverse curatorial and artistic practices can meet. Abby takes responsibility for one exhibition itself and entrusts two other rooms to befriended organisations. This approach makes it possible to experience three distinctly different worlds within one visit, without losing cohesion.
Abby presents: Coup de Thtre. A Play of Clay
In Coup de Thtre. A Play of Clay, Abby explores the theatrical potential of ceramics. The exhibition starts from Abby's rich ceramic collection—one of the most important in Flanders—and brings historical objects into dialogue with contemporary art and design.
Ceramics appear here as a medium of imagination, role-playing and mise-en-scne. Figures, objects and sets behave like actors on a stage, showing how ceramics have been used for centuries to represent identity, power, beauty and everyday life.
The exhibition is structured into three ‘acts’:
Act I – Role-playing: about characters, social types and figuration
Act II – Show & Display: about showpieces, presentation and cultural imagery
Act III – All the World’s a Stage: on nature, illusion and the interplay between reality and imagination
Together, these three parts form a parcours in which ceramics emerge as a theatre of the world in miniature.
The exhibition combines a selection of around ninety historical objects from the Abby collection with work by contemporary artists, including:
Uģis Albiņš, Nick Cave, William Cobbing, Ilke Cop, Eric Croes, Lou Cruard, Maen Florin, Bart Gielen, Daan Gielis, Batrice Guilleman, Helena Hafemann, Jessica Harrison, Kato Herbots, Beate Hing, Elonore Joulin, Mirthe Klck, Joke Raes, Augustas Serapinas, Wieki Somers, Roeland Tweelinckx, Sharon Van Overmeiren, Jonas Vansteenkiste, Goedel Vermandere and Anne Wenzel, complemented by works by Athos Burez and Gustave de Jonghe from Abby's collection.
In addition, in cooperation with Designregio Kortrijk,Abby also presents new work by young international designers inspired by the region's ceramic tradition.
Be-Part presents: Tom Callemin - Double Reality
With Double Reality, Be-Part at Abby brings together for the first time the photographic works that Tom Callemin (1991, Ostend) has developed over the past six years in the context of his doctoral research at KASK & Conservatory Ghent. The exhibition is not simply an overview of recent images, but the concentrated result of a trajectory in which themes such as identity, perception, psychology, violence and image manipulation have been systematically investigated. At the same time, the photographic medium itself is questioned: how do we read an image, why do we trust it, and what role does the maker play in constructing what we experience as reality?
Callemin starts from a fundamental question that feels particularly relevant today: to what extent can we still trust images at a time when they are increasingly edited, generated and staged? His work does not answer this question theoretically, but transforms it into images that open up new questions and perspectives. What initially appears familiar, calm or self-evident reveals itself, upon closer inspection, as a constructed situation that invites doubt. Double Reality is therefore not an exhibition of answers, but a parcours in which each image raises new questions.
Tom Callemin develops most of his work in the studio, where he constructs, with great precision, a world that disrupts our reading of images. This studio is not a neutral workspace, but a laboratory in which the artist explores the conditions of seeing. Light, shadow, camouflage, print, duplication and reconstruction are not merely technical tools, but essential elements that question the status of the image itself.
With a scenography specially developed for Abby—which includes an architectural installation at its centre—the making process also becomes visible. Visitors are invited to look actively and become aware of the mechanisms behind the image.
Wit.h presents: Authorities - Honor d'O & Gerard van Lankveld
Authorities invites us to step inside the minds of artists Honor d’O and Gerard van Lankveld, who serve the ‘Authorities’ at the invitation of Wit.h vzw. Both artists govern an unfathomable realm of intangibility, ruling over the vastness of existence. At its borders, this realm expands into new and shifting properties of worldly and spiritual fulfilment.
Gerard van Lankveld (b. 1947, Gemert, NL), pushed aside by society in his youth, proclaims himself emperor of Monera, Monera Carkos Vlado. His empire consists of monuments and symbolic attributes. Whether in reality or at scale, he creates self-designed and self-made, often precarious vehicles—riding, flying and sailing—alongside steam engines, timepieces, clocks and crowns, a triumphal arch, his own currency, script and flag, as well as means of communication and scientific measuring instruments.
Honor d’O (1961 (& 1984), Oudenaarde (& Ghent), BE) has pursued ‘permanent creation’ since early adulthood, in rhythm with the laws of nature. He focuses on the organic connection between looking, understanding and inspiration. He has physically moved a wall from his studio—the ‘Grammar Wall’—into the Abby museum. Punctuation marks, words and short sentences visually fill the surface. On the Wonder Wall, hundreds of small sculptures appear as traces, relics, models and/or future ‘exhibition concepts’ within his universal visual language.
