Social media Nav (en)

Primary Nav (en)

Secondary Nav (en)

Tickets Nav (en)

With the precious support of our partners

Register to our newsletter and don't miss anything anymore. We promise we will not spam you!

Get the latest news abOut kikk

Hussein Shikha is a multidisciplinary artist, graphic designer, writer, and researcher. He was born and raised in Iraq and moved to Antwerp in 2009. He graduated with an MA in visual arts from The Royal Academy of Fine Arts Antwerp. His work deals with the preservation, translation, and digitization of the visual culture from his intersectional experience as an Iraqi-Belgian. Currently, he is doing research on the erasure of handmade Iraqi tapestries and its idea of ‘beauty’ that relates to Islamic art, as a way to de-modernize his creative practices.

Hussein Shikha

Similar to layers of threads, the brain can learn to recognize patterns which makes it capable of weaving together visual forms to create a visual tapestry or simply our sight. 
Following Donna J. Haraway’s theory on neuron connections, through the subjective multi-layered consciousness, the artist’s brain becomes a metaphor for the neural network in which the spectator experiences presented works. That inner tapestry is embodied in the visual representation of one&#8217;s brain.
&nbsp;
On the technical and aesthetic capacities of this work, pixelation becomes a thread or a connection between technologies of weaving and the development of digital computing. This work becomes an opposition against arguments which relegates carpet weaving to an older temporal order, one incapable of connecting to modern technologies. Contrary to conventional ways of seeing digital technologies, there are real and vital connections – structural, aesthetic, and even spiritual connections – between older ways of weaving reality and newer ways.

Weaving of Sight

Delta

Hussein Shikha – Weaving Of Sight

Laura Nsengiyumva is a Brussels-based artivist, architect and researcher. Through her interdisciplinary practice, Nsengiyumva explores themes such as diasporic experience, hidden histories, North-South relations and empathy. She speaks about these topics through images and interventions on colonial spaces. . Her artivists actions like PeoPL (the melting of a statue of Leopold II) and Queen Nikkolah, are part of her research project &#8220;Shaping the presence of the African diaspora in Belgium&#8221;. Her transcultural view of history is based on human stories that invite us to find what brings us together.
Nsengiyumva is affiliated as an artistic researcher to Kask, the School of Arts of HOGENT, and howest. She won the first prize at the Kunstsalon Ghent in 2011, and the second prize at the Dakar Biennale in 2012. She is an artist resident of Kult-XL.

Laura Nsengiyumva

Helen is the biographical monolog of a young european woman. She speaks about her lovelife with a touching since- rity. Based on the buddhist idea that pain has the power of connecting people, her monolog is used by Afro-European women as an opportunity to make their voices heard. They share Helen’s pain by dubbing her voice in their maternal language. 
The languages are spread in the space in front of the screen in several auditive areas. It becomes an assembly of women as well as a travel for the visitor wandering through the voices. The non-understanding of the languages allows the visitor to experience exclusion and get to know the diversity of the African languages. As well as the understanding of one the languages leads to repair communitary links around an apolitical subject.
In the manner of the American soaps dubbed in Spanish, this «sound-cartography» is a way to claim the African presence in Europe and raise the idea of an Afro-European identity.

Helen

Galerie du Beffroi

Laura Nsengiyumva – Helen

Linda Dounia is a self-taught artist, designer, and curator from Senegal who explores the social construction of power and the cultural implications of how it is distributed. Linda is particularly curious about the relationship between individuals and the systems that govern them, and seeks to shed light on the ways in which hegemonic power structures affect her agency over her identity, physical embodiment, and environment.
Linda’s practice is rooted in technology while showing a deep respect for the tangible. Her practice plays with the borders that exist between a variety of digital and physical mediums and incorporates collaborations with AI and machine learning. She has a background in visual and interaction design.
In an approach that is both radical and poetic, Linda’s work seeks to bring herself out of a state of numbness and surrender to the patriarchal modus vivendi, and to create space for the quietly brewing resistances within her.

Linda Dounia

Linda Dounia’s long-form AI project, Spannungsbogen, reflects on issues of discrimination in commercial AI technology and the lack of representation of non western perspectives and data in generative adversarial network (GAN) generated art.
For this series, the artist hand painted 2,000 acrylic vignettes in an abstract style inspired the Fremen of Frank Herbert’s Dune. She then trained a GAN model with these paintings to output 10,000 new paintings that were then arranged following an indexing system that considers form, colour, and texture. Finally, Linda curated these outputs to feed into the creation of 80 animations of 1 minute each and 400 still images.
In Herbert’s words, spannungsbogen is ‘the self-imposed delay between desire for a thing and the act of reaching out to grasp that thing’. This series simulates a conversation between artist and machine, a dialectical search for meaning between a thinking mind and a feeling one, and an ode to the invisible creatures in the cracks and crevasses of the world, patiently lying in wait for their turn to freely exist.
Spannungsbogen was exhibited by Quantum Art online and in its physical space in Los Angeles. The entire series sold out in under 30 minutes on the day it was auctioned.

Laura Nsengiyumva – Helen

AboutLaura Nsengiyumva

KIKK in townHelen

Keep explOrinG

Linda Dounia – Spannungsbogen

View program

Hussein Shikha – Weaving Of Sight