24-26 september 2026
Opening hours: 8:00pm - 10:30pm during the show
Contact: janknops@atelierarthurrogiers.be / 0032494417070
Address: Keizer Karelstraat 103 - 1000 Brussels
Metro: 1 en 5 (Schuman)
Bus: 28 - 61 (Ardense Jagers) 64 (Luther)
60 - 63 (Ambiorix)
Work in Progress: WOLF
This story began with a deep upheaval in my life: the discovery that I was pregnant with my first child. That beautiful and terrifying moment confronted me, in the most physical way possible, with the stories I had been handed down. By day my body swelled with new life while I worked my way through a self-imposed canon. By night I had the strangest hormonal dreams with dwarves, wolves, and octopus stepmothers rising out of the fairy tales of my childhood, as if digging up those early prejudices had woken an army of mythical beasts.
This exhibition gathers a series of paintings that are, one by one, building the world of WOLF, an interactive AR experience. A device with a custom app triggers animated films and lets the paintings come to life. A story that reimagines ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ through the lens of Judith Butler’s ‘Gender Trouble’, presents with humour, absurdity and teeth, a lustful Red, a vegan Hunter, a murderous Grandmother and a Wolf with lapdog ambitions.
As a work in progress, this exhibition also functions as a playtest. Come prepared to hold a phone in your hand, to walk through the space to reveal what’s hidden under layers of paint, and to get an insider's look into the process of building up the concept of an AR exhibition.
Alex Verhaest (b. 1985, Belgium) is an experimental filmmaker with a soft spot for art’s most irritatingly gorgeous bastard child: story. She blends cinema, painting, video, and code into immersive installations that explore what it means to be human in an age where screens reign supreme.
For Verhaest, technology is never a show pony or a button that makes a phallus appear; it’s a sweaty little fat finger pointed at the human condition. She uses it to probe how we outsource emotion, trapping the spectator’s body back into the messy act of storytelling.
A hand-me-down computer became a trapdoor out of the suffocating Polly Pocket rig of her provincial hometown and into a mosh pit of misfits; the early internet in all its glorious chaos. Her practice still circles that moment of discovery, driven by the same impulse to connect, to short-circuit the monoculture-machine, and to look for tenderness inside circuitry.
In 2019, Verhaest graduated valedictorian from Le Fresnoy, studio national under the mentorship of Béla Tarr. Her work has been exhibited in numerous institutions (ZKM Karlsruhe, HKW Berlin, Bozar). She won the New Face Award at the Japan Media Arts Festival, and her work has been awarded the prestigious Ars Electronica Golden Nica. In 2023, Verhaest was awarded The Ultima; the Flemish cultural prize for her oeuvre.