Yasmine Akondo
Yasmine Akondo is a visual artistic researcher of existential encounters based in Antwerp, Belgium. Her practice is driven by conceptual questions about existence and ways of living, examining how cultural history and scientific frameworks shape human understanding. Her work often
references actions, objects, and narratives that recur across cultures, such as the rosary, circumambulation, and Genesis stories.
Through sculptures and installations, she creates spatial scenes in which stories can unfold. These environments and objects carry an inherent desire for activation, frequently through ritualistic practices, allowing the work to evolve through interaction within a specific space and moment.
Her creative process is grounded in a fascination with “point zero”: an unknown, undefined space—a void where everything remains possible, suspended between presence and absence. This concept provides a lens for exploring different modes of being and underpins her conceptual approach to art.
Jay Albaos
Jay Albaos (1991) explores how migrants—workers, students of color, undocumented people, among
many others—create place and selfhood in foreign environments. His method, artistic immersion, uses collaboration, participation, and dialogue to foster artistic creation and engage migration (policy) contexts.
A former community worker with Indigenous Peoples and a theatre performer, he later studied Live Art in Helsinki and earned an advanced MA in Cultural Anthropology at KULeuven. He is now a doctoral candidate at LUCA School of Arts/KU Leuven while working fulltime at Decathlon. His work entwines anthropology, ethnography, and performance– moving between solo pieces and (community)collaborations. Born in Dipolog, Philippines, he is now based in Gent, Belgium.
Deborah Claire
Born in Marseille in 1989, Déborah Claire is a visual artist, independent curator, and art researcher living and working between Brussels and Antwerp. Of French, Guianese, and Martinican heritage, and trained in photography, she develops a hybrid practice combining photography, video, writing, research, and curatorial work. Her work is rooted in a feminist and decolonial perspective, focusing on bodies, their representation, and the politics of care. She examines how aesthetic norms and colonial legacies shape our narratives and ways of seeing, and seeks to construct embodied, sensitive, and powerful counter-narratives. She has exhibited in Paris, Brussels, Antwerp, and Ghent, is the
co-funder of Dis Mon Nom a curatorial duo with Erell Hemmer and has worked as a curatorial assistant at FOMU, the Photography Museum of Antwerp in Belgium.
Manon Clement
In Clement’s work, the presence of words within the textile space plays a crucial role. She works with both manual and industrial weaving techniques. Poetic words are always searching for tangibility, for a place where they can acquire meaning. By embedding words into textiles, an attempt at dialogue emerges—where the words enrich the textile structure. Clement explores the tension between ephemerality and material presence by investigating the connection between words and images. Her works hover between recognition and estrangement, challenging the viewer to reflect on the
meaning of both material and message. The imagery in her work stems from a personal archive that she continuously expands. In some pieces, Clement also plays with the technical aspects of weaving. Here, words become a structure in themselves, with the woven fabric generating a visual composition. This raises questions about the front and back of the work, and the spatial dimension that unfolds when one pauses to read a word.
Words and textiles become interwoven, as the texture of the material strengthens the words and grants them space. Words always need a surface to keep them from dissolving into their fleeting nature. Material renders words visible and tangible, allowing them to take on a presence. Without this
space, words would dissipate in their transience and abundance. Textile offers lost words a place to exist, allowing written or printed language to remain within a defined context from which they cannot escape.
Michal Luft
Michal Luft (b. 1989) is a Brussels-based artist and researcher working across installation and photography. Her work moves between the personal and the structural — tracing desire, loss, and the absurd persistence of human effort through a symbolic language of empty spaces, suspended thresholds, and gestures that repeat without resolving.
She is drawn to institutional and semi-public interiors — especially to spaces and scenes that signal order and maintain the appearance that everything is as it “should” be. She studies these environments closely, then repeats their logic and aesthetics within an exhibition space, to create a quiet obedience: things doing exactly what they are supposed to do, and it is precisely this compliance that reveals something unsettling.
Her research project, Living Room, explored how personal and collective histories of loss shape perceptions of home. Drawing from family history and personal archives, open calls, recordings, spatial interventions, and a long-term photography project with artists from Kunsthuis Yellow Art, an atelier within the OPZ Psychiatric Hospital in Geel, Belgium, the research assembled a multi-voiced archive tracing how home is felt, lost, and remembered.
Luft holds an MFA from the Royal Academy of Fine Arts, Antwerp (2022), where her research project was supported in 2024–25. Recently, she has been an artist-in-residence at KAOS (BE) and RU (NY). Her work has been shown in solo and group exhibitions, including S.M.A.K. (Ghent), Marres (Maastricht), and RU (New York), among others.
Jelle Annie Michiels (Woonschip Leon #31)
Antwerp-based visual artist Jelle Annie Michiels (°1981) explores the "hollow of grief" —addressing silenced trauma and losses that often go unrecognized. When language fails, she employs writing, film, drawing, and textile work as modes of resistance and narration. Her material practice
mirrors the slow, uneven rhythms of recovery, allowing work to unfold at the pace of healing.
Rather than seeking closure, Michiels creates sculptural companions that embody rootlessness and longing. These forms serve as an alternative archive of grief, valueing presence over performance. By transforming personal trauma into a shared space for care, she invites others into
a conversation where complexity is honored over resolution.
Anna Püschel
Anna Püschel´s work explores different ways of acquiring knowledge. Her practice spans analogue photography, image distortion techniques, movement, archiving and writing. In her work, she explores how we try to make sense of our existence – how we acquire an understanding of the world surrounding us and which role our well-being plays in our individual approaches to reality. Melting different epistemologies into inquiries about certainty and truth, Anna questions our definitions of what we think we know. Her often deeply personal artistic research touches upon perception, pluriformity and access to information and power, while her dreamlike images remind
us that reality is but an ever changing concept. Next to her artistic path, Püschel is currently pursuing an artistic PhD at LUCA School of Arts in Ghent, Flanders, with a research on neurodivergent inclusion in the arts. Her publications can be found in public and private collections in Europe, America, Australia and Asia.
L. Puska
L. Puska is an interdisciplinary artist with a performance-led and material-based practice. Her work expands mediums of drawing, sculpture, and video as well as collaborative practices and choreographed routines. She considers objects as potential companions and a performative gesture as a tool to direct attention. Puska is interested in how agency is negotiated within social and
material structures.
Marens Van Leunen
Marens van Leunen (Amsterdam, 1994) is a Dutch visual artist and photographer, currently based in Antwerp. Her work explores the relationship between individuals, their everyday environment and the objects within it. Central themes in her work include collecting, archiving, memory, identity and the role of objects in shaping daily life. She investigates how everyday objects can carry meaning, emotion, and symbolic value, often focusing on domestic spaces. Her practice moves fluidly between personal archive and shared experience, inviting reflection on how we live with and through the objects in our daily lives.
In 2024, Van Leunen was nominated by FOMU Antwerp for Tiff ‘24, Emerging Belgian Photography and for FUTURES, a European Photography Platform. She graduated from the Royal Academy of Fine Arts of Ghent (KASK) in 2023.
Elisabeth Woronoff
Elisabeth Woronoff is a multidisciplinary artist and creative director working at the intersection of performing arts, visual arts, and music. She uses her voice, writes, makes space for others to
express and to connect, beyond language and culture, around vulnerable topics. Deeply engaged in artistic activism, Elisabeth’s in-situ installations and live works address societal issues and are
rooted in documentary research. She creates works that give visibility to hidden violences, silenced narratives ; transforms personal and collective wounds into shared spaces of resilience and creation.
Her practice spans installation, fashion, performance, painting, sculpture, photography, directing, singing, writing, ink, and poetry. She is guided by an instinctive exploration of embodied memory, space, clothing, symbols, and language. Words written and sung in public space, always across
multiple languages.