Featuring contributions by Michael Van den Abeele, Chantal Akerman, Danai Anesiadou, Ethan Assouline, Sammy Baloji, Marianne Berenhaut, Kasper Bosmans, Jef Cornelis, Jos de Gruyter & Harald Thys, Laurent Dupont, Jana Euler, Arnaud Eubelen, Collectif Faire-part, Béla Feldberg, Mona Filleul, Gust Duchateau, Felix Kindermann, Aglaia Konrad, Stéphane Mandelbaum, Céline Mathieu, Hana Miletić, Shaun Motsi, Willem Oorebeek, Jurgen Ots, Marina Pinsky, Sophie Podolski, Emile Rubino, Chéri Samba, Michaela Schweighofer, Beat Streuli, Walter Swennen, and Angharad Williams.

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Brussels is not a city of seamless processes. It is precisely through its imperfections, improvisations and prosthetic fixes that the city unfolds its singular, almost deranged energy. Alongside its dysfunctionality, the pervasive appropriation and reinterpretation of histories, spaces and objects shape the urban fabric. In Brussels, the permeability between urban life and artistic practice is unusually direct. What is encountered on the street finds its way into the work. Even the name Brussels, derived from Old Dutch and meaning “home in the swamp”, points to a soft, fermenting substratum from which new forms continually emerge.

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Anyone living in Brussels is confronted with bricolage: car bodies wrapped in adhesive tape, buildings secured by makeshift means, peculiar shop windows. The makeshift leaves scars upon the urban body, which in turn generate their own form of permanence. Ad hoc structures establish themselves wherever responsibilities begin to fray: Brussels consists of nineteen municipalities, just as many mayors, a web of regional and national competences, historical lines of conflict, and monarchical representation. Set against the city’s fragile structural cohesion are the heavyweight presences of the EU and NATO. Since the 1950s, the European Quarter has undergone the kind of urban redevelopment for which the term “Brusselisation” was coined. The word now appears wherever history disappears under the pressure of new forms of expediency.

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Brussels was marked early on by the contradictions of modernity: industrialisation, growth and prosperity went hand in hand with colonial violence and exploitation. To this day, these histories remain inscribed in the cityscape, in the ornamental exuberance of Art Nouveau, whose floral forms drew inspiration from the botany of the Congo, as well as in the materials and raw resources brought to Belgium from its former colonies. The traces of this history also permeate everyday life: in flea markets, second-hand shops and antique dealers. Objects no longer deemed useful are left in public space and granted a new life. In this state of perpetual circulation, the city itself becomes a studio through acts of artistic appropriation and revaluation.

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The exhibition at the Kölnischer Kunstverein brings together works by thirty-five artists and filmmakers. Many of them are characterised by an ambiguous, at times melancholic tone, suggesting a distant kinship with the muted atmosphere of Flemish painting. Other works are marked by a subtle humour and formal vocabularies whose rough-hewn and fragile aesthetics might be described as fragmentary, enigmatic and at times surreal.

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Certain artistic approaches also evoke Situationist practices: the “construction of situations” as a form of everyday revolution, or the dérive, the Situationist principle of deliberate drifting according to a self-determined logic, remain more than mere theory in Brussels. Their traces, translated into the present, appear in an artistic attitude that does not regard the city as a fixed stage, but rather as a space of experience for deviation, drift and appropriation.

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Curated by Fabian Flückiger and Valérie Knoll

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We are delighted that Eine Stadt als Atelier has been nominated for the *WESTSTERN Prize 2026 in the category Exhibition.

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Supported by: Kunststiftung NRW; Schweizer Kulturstiftung ProHelvetia; Bundesministerium Wohnen, Kunst, Kultur, Medien und Sport; Stadt Köln Kulturamt; Gaffel Kölsch; Heller&C.

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Since its founding in 1839, the Kölnischer Kunstverein has repeatedly dedicated exhibitions to the Belgian art scene. A City as Studio continues this tradition, initially offering an external perspective on Brussels in Cologne, before travelling in altered form to Etablissement d’en face in Brussels in early 2027 and subsequently to Beijing.

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