Edition 2025

Kinoshita’s works deal with combinations of several disciplines. Throughout her oeuvre, one can find elements from theatre and experimental music, two fields in which she was active for some time. Duration (time) and a conscious approach regarding the position of the viewer are two important aspects in her work. No themes, rather an interest in reading between the lines would describe her engagement. Kinoshita considers her work as a space where different works interact with each other but also with the viewer. How these different roles are taken by different players within a specific spatial condition is something she continues exploring.

The exhibition Renovation takes as its starting point the antechambers of the Centre for Fine Arts as they stood at the close of the previous exhibition. The artist uses them as the basis to create a new mise-en-scene within the space in which elements already present are transformed and certain spaces that were dormant or invisible to the public are reactivated. Derived from the Italian word ‘anticamera’, the term antechamber generally refers to spaces of introduction, or spaces in which to wait before entering the main rooms of a house. They are also linked to the ‘genkan’, the intermediary space that gives access to the Japanese home, and which is a recurring theme and focus of attention in the artist’s work.

With their historic point of entry temporarily restored via the Rue Royale, it has been possible to literally ‘uncover’ the majority of these volumes from beneath the tarpaulins that were permanently blocking out the glass roofs, and to restore the natural variations of the light that depend on the time of day and the prevailing weather conditions.

A few existing works and many new ones have emerged over the course of a long period of transformation in which the space has become a temporary workshop for deconstruction, inventory, and creation. The structure of the previous scenography was dismantled plank by plank, and partly recreated, with the use of drawing, to become a sculptural entity on which new works or traces of the artist’s handwriting have been superimposed. These fresh creations, made from entirely new or reused materials, are what the artist refers to as ‘Platzhalter’, intermediate objects that bridge the gap between an initial function and a new one.

A series of drawings inspired by the manga of Hokusai have taken their place in the only room deprived of daylight, where a new doorway leading to an area at the rear has been opened back up. Other works on paper, subject to the constant variation of natural light, unfurl and unfold across a building’s old shelving—now freshly integrated into a brand new structure—or find their place on the walls or in the adjacent room, where the meteorological dimension of the weather merges with the philosophical dimension of Time.

Whether depicted in graphite, pencil, or gouache on the kind of paper normally intended for food, or recomposed from the boards, these inventory works and the remaining traces of the building end up revealing themselves simultaneously, allowing visitors the opportunity to make them their own. As the works have grown over the course of several weeks, their presence has become a concrete and sensorial archive of the space.

Suchan Kinoshita lives and works in Brussels. She studied rhythmics and later contemporary music theatre at the Music Academy in Cologne. From 1988 to 1990, she was a resident at the Jan van Eyck Academy in Maastricht. In 1993, she was selected for a two-year residency at PS1 in New York. Since 2006, she has been teaching at the Kunstakademie Münster. Suchan Kinoshita’s work has been exhibited in numerous international exhibitions. In 1992, she won the Prix de Rome in the category “Art and Public Space,” and in 2015 she received one of the Greenberger Awards in New York.