5.11.2025 at 18:00

Els Silvrants-Barclay (Belgium, 1980, lives in Brussels) is a curator and researcher, focusing on what art can be and do outside of its own institutions, and in relation to spaces, cities, landscapes, and their politics.

In 2025, she is the lead curator for The Woman Who Thought She Was a Planet, a series of artistic actions in the industrial landscape of Buda on the outskirts of Brussels.

She is also associate researcher at the Centre for Urban Studies (VUB University Brussels) and vice president of BOZAR, Belgium’s largest federal cultural institution.

Previously she was, among other things, lecturer and senior researcher at the Department of Architecture of ETH Zürich, director of the contemporary arts center Netwerk Aalst (now NW) in Belgium and co-founder of the Institute for Provocation, a workspace for artists and architects in Beijing.

Her talk at Kohta, titled We are already in it, departs from the Buda project and speculates on how exhibition-making in non-institutional settings can operate as a mode of prefiguration – where speaking about dissolves into a being with, or rather, a being in it together.

In dialogue with the artistic practices of Beverly Buchanan, Sarah Smolders and Lucile Desamory, Silvrants-Barclay will invoke notions of the absent, the overlooked, and the fluid to consider how art can embody realities beyond itself and transcend its own system.

The talk is given in English.