In the spring of 2022, M HKA will devote a focused archive presentation to the work of the little-known British avant-garde artist Marlow Moss (1889-1958). She was not only radical in her art practice – with which she inspired her more famous colleague Mondriaan, with her fluid identity and idiosyncratic way of life she also has a voice in the current gender debate.

The presentation will be mainly based on Composition with double line and blue plane (1934), and some very special and never before seen sketches, watercolors, calculations and documentary material in the possession of Andreas Oosthoek, the so-called agent and treasurer of the estate Moss and the Nijhoff family.

Writer and poet Andreas Oosthoek still lives in the house that the Nijhof family had built in the 1930s and where the Dutch writer Netty Nijhoff and life partner Moss stayed. He still keeps special material, knowledge and stories from and about Marlow Moss there. Together with filmmaker Fifi Visser, M HKA made a documentary about the tangible traces that Marlow Moss left in Zeeland and the surrounding area on the basis of several interviews and testimonies. The documentary Wreckwood. The Marlow Moss suitcase provides the presentation with extensive context and qualitative layering. The film is an integral part of the presentation, but will of course also be shown in the cinemas of 'De Cinema'.

Tarik Kiswanson’s new solo exhibition for the Museum of Contemporary Art in Antwerp includes video work, a series of sculptures, performance and writing. Kiswanson’s multidisciplinary artistic practice explores notions of rootlessness, regeneration, disintegration, hybridity, and polyphony. Kiswanson’s works engage with topics related to memory, history, heritage, learning and belonging operating at the intersection of names, cultures, and languages. One of the main subjects of the exhibition will be the notion of tumbling and levitation. The idea of levitation is explored in the physical sense, but above all as a psychological state of mind. To be in-between is also to be suspended between different conditions, cultures and contexts. The space will be inhabited by “floating” interconnected elements.

As part of the project Kiswanson creates a new performance work with the Moroccan preadolescent Mehdi that he worked closely with in the film The Fall (2020). Birth and coming-of-age have been central themes in Kiswanson's works, but in this new solo performance he introduces death and the end of life as an equally important question in his exploration of the human condition.

Tarik Kiswanson is a visual artist, poet and performance artist based in Paris. His identity is one defined by multiple cultures. Throughout his life, he has explored the question of identity, displacement, desire and the ‘in-between’ through writing and sculpture.

During a museum visit in the early 1970s, LIDL-artist Chris Reinecke was suspected of wanting to set the building on fire. As usual, she carried cod liver oil, a vitamin supplement, and they thought it was petrol! After the R.A.F., there was distrust of engaged art. Reinecke's oeuvre captures, perhaps better than any other work of the period, the ethical dilemma of an individual torn between art and activism.

Art’s Birthday is an annual event normally organised every 17th of January by the M HKA. This year, due to covid restrictions and with Filliou’s approval, we opted to organize the celebration of art in festive, oldskool style in the spring of 2022. On Friday 27 May, during Antwerp Art Weekend, we’ll paint the town red!

Art’s Birtday was initiated in 1963 by French artist, performer, sculptor and ‘action poet’ Robert Filliou, who was associated with the international Fluxus movement. Filliou proposed that, after 1,000,000 years, mankind should celebrate the fact that art exists and is still alive.

For more than fourteen years M HKA has maintained the annual Art’s Birthday tradition of ‘serious fun’, following Fluxus’ creative spirit and Filliou’s dream of ‘The Eternal Network’. A selection of artists have been invited to freely interpret the usual sequence of events that make up Art’s Birthday celebrations at M HKA. True to our tradition Art’s Birthday 2022 will feature contributions by invited artists in the form of a digital invitation (Imge Özbilge), an artwork displayed on the museum’s façade (Charline Tyberghein), a state of the arts (sung by Gerard Herman), a birthday
cake (Kasper Devos), performances and installations by a.o. Marijke De Roover, Olivia Hernaïz, Roel Heremans & Enki De Vries, Gijs Milius, Oussama Tabti,….
And we end the party with a DJ set by NUOVCHKA (Marlies De Clerck & Jason Dousselaere).

Gijs Milius °1985, Utrecht (NL) - lives and works in Brussels (BE)
The practice of Gijs Milius covers drawings and paintings, as well as video,
temporary installations, sculptures and audio works.

Superhost is a programme that invests in a year-long relationship between an artist or a collective practice, the museum and its participating communities, and supports the production of artworks, performative or discursive creations.

Superhost 2022, the second edition of the series, is a project by Falke Pisano titled Where Should We Begin? It consists of a site-specific installation, displays of artworks by invited artists, performative works, lectures, screenings, interviews and workshops conducted by the host and its guests throughout the year.

Where Should We Begin? is a sustained, multi-layered (practical, conversational and artistic) research into labour conditions in the field of art, with a specific focus on the labour involved in public programming in art institutions. Situated within the museum, this research aims at collapsing discursive ideals and material realities to discover how different practitioners carve out a space for imagination and desire as they consciously negotiate the conditions in which they work.