40th anniversary of Chambres d’Amis at S.M.A.K

S.M.A.K. in Ghent marks the 40th anniversary of Chambres d’Amis with an exhibition running from 30 May 2026 to 10 January 2027. The original 1986 project was the work of Jan Hoet, then director of the city’s Museum van Hedendaagse Kunst, who persuaded around fifty Ghent households to open their living rooms, stairwells and bedrooms to contemporary artists for the summer. It was a deliberate break from the white-cube model: instead of bringing visitors to art in a neutral museum setting, Hoet sent the art out into the unpredictability of people’s homes. He later described his motivation bluntly: he was uncomfortable with the idea that art is here, and reality is there, separated. Hoet went on to direct Documenta IX in Kassel in 1992 and, in 1999, became founding director of S.M.A.K. (Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst), the institution that grew out of the museum he had run since 1975. He died in 2014, but Chambres d’Amis remains the project most closely associated with his name and with Ghent’s reputation for exhibitions staged in public and private space rather than purely within museum walls.

For the 40th-anniversary edition, S.M.A.K. has invited three artists, each with a direct connection to the museum’s history of off-site exhibitions, to design new gallery interventions rather than recreate the original show. Heike Pallanca, born in Düsseldorf in 1952, took part in the original 1986 edition; her contribution played on the gap between a real and a constructed space, and her practice still centers on perception and the boundary between lived and built environments. Haim Steinbach, born in Rehovot in 1944 and based in New York, participated in the 2000 Ghent exhibition Over The Edges; since the late 1970s his work has examined how everyday objects gain meaning through display and arrangement, a theme that connects directly to the domestic staging at the heart of Chambres d’Amis. Susanne Kriemann, born in Erlangen in 1972, was part of TRACK in 2012, S.M.A.K.’s third large urban exhibition; her work deals with archives and overlooked historical material, and for this show she focuses on the photographic archive of the 1986 exhibition itself.

The exhibition is anchored by an archival display tracing the history of Chambres d’Amis, including the reinstallation of Daniel Buren’s Le Décor et son Double, a reconstruction of collectors Anton and Annick Herbert’s guest room that Buren placed inside the museum in 1986 as a pointed critique of the exhibition’s own premise. Visitors can also book visits to see the original room at the Herbert Foundation. The show is curated by Philippe Van Cauteren and Thibaut Verhoeven, with the archival research developed alongside Ghent University researchers Angela De Roover, Beth Lason, Luca-Ray Rogiers and Sofie Frederix.

Chambres d’Amis is on view at S.M.A.K through January 10, 2027.

@smakghent