Curatorial Studies at KASK

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België
Ghent
Curatorial Studies at KASK

The only postgraduate curatorial programme in Belgium, Curatorial Studies at KASK is a one-year inten

08/09/2026

Contour Biennale opened its 11th edition this weekend, with a two-day programme of convenings, tours and conversations unfolding across Mechelen’s heritage and cultural sites. Titled The Eyes of the Heart and the Soul of the World, this edition is curated by Sofia Lemos and runs until 1 November, marking the biennale’s return after a three-year hiatus with a focused, small-scale relaunch across five venues in the city.

Four alumni of the Curatorial Studies programme played a significant role in bringing this edition to life, each contributing through a different route into the project. Bethan Burnside joined as Curatorial Fellow through a partnership between Curatorial Studies and Kunsthal Mechelen. Daphné Charitos took on the role of Project Coordinator with Contour itself, helping guide the biennale from concept through to opening. Jessica Meuleman brought her curatorial training to Kunsthal Mechelen, where she is responsible for production and communication, while Zinnia Fay supported the programme in a curatorial capacity, working closely with the team across its development. Building this edition within a newly re-established organisation, still finding its footing after a three-year hiatus, has required patience and adaptability throughout. Their commitment and expertise have been integral to shaping what Contour has become, and this edition would not have been possible without them. Thank you!!

10/03/2026

Curatorial Studies is pleased to present ‘Screening the Museum’, a two-day film programme bringing cinema into dialogue with contemporary museum practice in the frame of ‘Art Policy and Museum Studies’.

Through five films and public conversations with invited guests, the programme explores questions of decolonisation, ecology, exhibition design, and digital innovation in museums today. Each screening will be followed by a discussion moderated by students from the Curatorial Studies Programme.

Location
KASK Cinema
Godshuizenlaan 4, Gent

Doors 18:30
Screenings 19:00

*Friday, 13 March*
Dahomey (2024) — Mati Diop
Rezbotanik (2025) — Pedro Gonçalves Ribeiro

Panel with Fabrizio Terranova and Hugo DeBlock
Moderated by .meffrechol

*Monday, 16 March* — SOLD OUT
The Responsive Eye (1966) — Brian De Palma
Everything You Want (2025) — Mariana Machado
Apaganda (2018) — Alexandre Humbert

Panel with Gosia Gołąbek, Mariana Machado, and Olivier Vandhuynslager
Moderated by and

10/03/2026

Yesterday’s Curatorial Vocabularies seminar with Fernanda Brenner unfolded as a reflection on curating not as the production of exhibitions, but as the long-term construction of relationships, contexts, and forms of knowledge.

Brenner—founding artistic director of Pivô in São Paulo and senior advisor for Latin America at Kadist Art Foundation—spoke from a practice developed over more than a decade through research residencies and commissions that privilege process over outcome. Working between São Paulo and Paris, her approach positions the curatorial not as a format or discipline, but as a method for sustaining inquiry over time.

At the center of the seminar was Pivô’s model as a process-led institution. Rather than beginning with a finished exhibition concept, many projects emerge from long periods of dialogue and shared research with artists. Residencies function as laboratories for experimentation where curators and artists work alongside one another, allowing projects to develop slowly and often unpredictably.

Through examples from her collaborations with artists such as Paulo Nazareth and Ana Vaz, Brenner described how curatorial work can become a form of co-research. These collaborations unfold across years, engaging questions of migration, ecology, landscape, and memory, while remaining attentive to the specific social and political contexts in which they emerge.

05/03/2026

Young Curators Programme fellows announced!

The Young Curators Programme (YCP) is a fellowship designed to provide opportunities for emerging curators based in the Flemish and French communities. Participants benefit from stays in Venice, during which they develop research activities while gaining experience through active participation in the life of the Belgian Pavilion at the International Art Exhibition—the Venice Biennale. This initiative represents a unique and rare learning opportunity within the context of a major international art event. It focuses on the transmission of curatorial expertise and exchange with international professional circles, while also providing mediation for the Belgian national pavilion, where emerging curators actively take on the role of hosts and cultural mediators for the public.

Curatorial Studies at KASK & Conservatorium (HOGENT—Howest) is among the main partners of the project and, as such, reserves half of the available places for its students and alumni. The fellows for the 2026 Biennale are Natalija Gucheva, Eline Ringhausen, Anna Laganovska, Carla Robin, Claris Ramnoux, Maartje Claes. They will provide mediation for It Never Ssst by Miet Warlop in the Belgian pavilion during the 61st International Art Exhibition—the Venice Biennale (May 9–November 22, 2026). Curator: Caroline Dumalin.

gucheva claes

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The Young Curators Programme is coordinated by Laila Melchior. Its main partners are Curatorial Studies (KASK & Conservatorium), ArBA-EsA—Académie royale des Beaux-Arts, Flemish Community, Fédération Wallonie-Bruxelles, Bureau International de la Jeunesse. In collaboration with: MORPHO, Kanal-Centre Pompidou and Scuola Piccola Zattere.

19/01/2026

In this morning’s Curatorial Vocabularies class, Magali Elali started from lived experience, as a POC, a freelancer, and the coordinator of a POC platform, to unpack terms that circulate all too easily in the art world: inclusion, diversity, community, and care. Rather than treating them as goals already achieved, she foregrounded the frictions they produce when lived within predominantly white institutions and precarious working conditions. Inclusion, Elali argued, is not a label but a continuous negotiation, often marked by isolation, emotional labour, and the sense of being a permanent guest in spaces that claim openness.

08/12/2025

Every few weeks the Curatorial Vocabularies seminar invites a guest speaker to speak about a keyword.

Today, Nick Aikens explores “transmission” as the movement of ideas, imaginaries, and agency—especially within today’s landscape of militarization, war, and a fractured public sphere. He reflects on exhibition-making as a spatial and sensorial practice that can transmit meaning beyond the violence of representation, revealing knowledge that emerges through the act of constellating artworks rather than presenting fixed positions. Drawing on thinkers like Denise Ferreira da Silva, he connects these questions to his current focus on radio as a curatorial form. Through examples such as Chimurenga’s Pan African Space Station, Yasmina Reggad, Adelitá Husni-Bey, Precious Okoyomon, lumbung radio, and Radio Alhara, he considers how radio opens multidirectional, collective, and institution-traversing modes of transmission. The seminar outlines these evolving contours through his research-based exhibition practice and ongoing work with radio.

03/12/2025

On 3 December, CS dives into the work of Everlyn Nicodemus and the research of Zoé Samudzi at WIELS.

The afternoon unfolds around two axes: a closed workshop on curatorial refusal, witnessing and the politics of representation, followed by a public lecture in which Samudzi offers a broader reading of Nicodemus’s practice, moderated by CS participants and

Nicodemus, a major yet long-undervalued figure in African modern and contemporary art, approaches histories of genocide, exile and survival through embodied forms. Her 16-metre ´Reference Scroll to Massacres, Genocides and Ethnic Cleansing’ is a central work in the exhibition, a textile archive that asks how to record atrocity without reducing it.

Samudzi’s research on German colonial genocide in Namibia and her recent withdrawal from an exhibition in Dresden opens another entry point into these questions: how institutions frame violence, whose authority is recognised, and when saying “no” becomes an ethical imperative.

Together, the workshop and lecture create space to think about trauma, refusal, memory, and the responsibilities of curators working within European institutions.

27/11/2025

Our curatorial study trip to Kaunas and Vilnius unfolded against a backdrop of heightened geopolitical unease in Eastern Europe, a tension palpable across the Baltics, Poland and Georgia, and which framed our encounters with art, pedagogy and curatorial practice throughout the week.

At the 15th Kaunas Biennial, Life After Life, works at Kaunas Artists’ House probed how industrial, political and social pasts persist in the present. Our conversation with curator Adomas Narkevičius situated the biennial within a wider European condition marked by militarisation and fragile institutional ecologies. .n

A workshop and walk with Agnė Bagdžiūnaitė extended this into the city, tracing overlooked trajectories of women artists and the gendered conditions of urban cultural production.

In Vilnius, Bells and Cannons at the Contemporary Art Centre confronted the cultural reverberations of militarisation directly. Valentinas Klimašauskas clarified recent attempts by far-right actors to instrumentalise cultural policy in Lithuania and the collective pushback that followed.

At the National Gallery of Art, Dr. Lo**ta Jablonskienė guided us through Soviet-era curatorial legacies and their contemporary rearticulations, while Shadows Leave Traces, co-curated by Gabriele Radzevičiūtė, reframed Northern landscapes and identities within Baltic-Nordic dialogues.

A central node of the trip was Rupert AEP, a para-academic, transdisciplinary programme that rethinks artistic education and collective labour. Working under the constellation The Secretary, the Shaman, the Scholar, the Lobbyist, the Publicist and the Virtuoso, the programme asked not just “What is art?” but “What sustains art and those who make it?” After our initial exchange at with the participants, we joined the final presentations and studio visits, a culmination of months of collaborative, process-driven research, and closed the week with a shared DJ-set. .vilnius

30/10/2025

Today in our Writing and Curating class, led by and , we had the pleasure of welcoming .sook.choi

Together, we explored what it might mean to build eco-literacy through processing climate grief, asking how we can grieve for life forms we cannot fully understand, and what new forms of knowing might arise from that grief.

Youngsook shared insights from her long-term project In Every Bite of the Emperor (2021–ongoing), which traces transnational narratives of extraction and environmental loss, from post-mining towns in Northern England to Malaysian rainforests and Vietnamese waterscapes.

Rooted in ritual, hospitality, and care ethics, her work treats collective grief as a socio-political autopsy, unpacking how ecological destruction and human suffering intertwine. Through grief rituals, compostable aesthetics, gatherings, installations, and interspecies collaborations, Youngsook cultivates eco-literacy as a form of shared re-imagination.

🫖 The session concluded with a tea ceremony and the collective writing of an embodied prayer for our broken planet.

Adres

Jozef Kluyskensstraat 2
Ghent
9000

Telefoon

+3292433600

Website

http://www.curatorialstudies.be/

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