Magical Realism, Imagining Natural Dis/Order

“The wide range of practices brought together in Magical Realism, Imagining Natural Dis/Order search for renewed ways of relating to ‘natural’ environments, invoking strategies for re-enchanting, not as a romantic gesture that would uphold the sublime quality of nature, but rather as a gesture towards imagining otherwise,” writes Sofia Dati, co-curator of the exhibition on view at WIELS through September 28th, 2025. Magical Realism, Imagining Natural Dis/Order, curated by Dati, Helena Kritis and Dirk Snauwaert, continues WIELS’ series of large-scale thematic exhibitions which have engaged with pressing international issues, and follows The Absent Museum (2017) and Risquons-tout (2020). Magical Realism comes together to explore, examine and reconsider climate change concerns not as an issue of data and science-based facts, but its effect on us emotionally and physically, and our relationship to the planet amidst irreversible environmental change.

The exhibition, spread throughout the vast industrial art centre, brings together over thirty international artists working in a variety of mediums, including installation, film, sound, photography and sculpture. “[The works] engage with different spaces, from the cosmos and its galaxies to the scientist’s lab; matters such as bodies of water, bacterial skins or 3D prints; and geologic processes surfacing through the underground rumbling of the earth or the noise of a sinking city.” The exhibition builds around four ‘main characters’: the wild, the witch, the shape-shifter and the time-traveller. “Each character summons magical realism as a potential ground for re-worlding, differently, on the ruins of the anthropogenic Earth,” writes Dati. Loosely, ‘Wild’ is that which escapes enclosures, whether capitalist or societal and thrives unencumbered, flirting with the magical and unknown; the ‘Witch’ embraces the feminine but also the rebel, the fighter and the primal connection to nature; The ‘Shape-Shifter’, connects to that which is sees and experiences multiple things from multiple perspectives, hybridity, possibility; and the ‘Time-Traveller’ expands reality, it taps into fleeting dreams, deep geological time, the boundless universe.

Materials seen throughout the exhibition speak about transformation – as with the billowing snakeskin in Edith Dekyndt’s film Animal Methods, or fragility, as with the delicate wall pieces using organic dyes by Ann Veronica Janssens, or survival, as seen in the clay agrarian vessels by Palestinian-American artist Jumana Manna. Adrian Villar Rojas’ sculpture suspends from a metal contraption as if a relic from a post-apocalyptic landscape – monstrous and magnetic at the same time, ‘the end of the imagination’, as Dirk Snauwaert notes; in another room, Cecilia Vicuña’s poetic Quipus made of small discarded debris – plastic, sticks, thread, paper, are suspended in quiet reflection, traces of a story that once was. In a similar way, Suzanne Jackson’s gestural, almost painterly assemblage sculptures made from found and recycled paper, plastic and other ‘non-substractive’ debris seem to be remnants from another time.

Many of the installations are immersive, allowing visitors to move in and around them, to enter into their universe. Elizabeth Povinelli’s extensive project Museum of the Tardigrade, recounts the history of an imagined civilisation – with texts, scriptures, artefacts – including jewellery and objects. Indonesian artist, Ade Darmawan’s installation Tuban, is about the extractivist, colonialist legacy of spice trading. Glass beakers and boiling flasks are placed on wooden tables – like a mid-century laboratory or classroom – distilling spices into oil, many of which bubble over, staining former history books pushed by the Suharto regime. On the walls hang AI generated drawings of the landscape in states of ‘paradise’ and decay.

Maarten Vanden Eynde’s colourful paintings, Material Matters, made in collaboration with the Lubumbashi-based Congolese artist Musasa, use vibrant symbols and imagery, suggestive of educational texts, to explain a naturally occurring element from the periodic table. Annie Ratti’s quilted textiles, employ morphological patterns that are inspired by extinct animals. Suzanne Huskey’s felted tapestry recounts a history of the (ongoing) fight for protecting the earth. Through its constellation of works, Magical Realism, Imagining Natural Dis/Order demonstrates how art can open portals to other ways of knowing and being, urging us to consider fragility not as weakness but as possibility, and to see transformation as both inevitable and necessary. The exhibition doesn’t attempt to be didactic or preachy, rather it gives us an open invitation to imagine otherwise, and to take part in re-enchanting the world we share.

The full list of artists includes: Bianca Baldi, Minia Biabiany, Gaëlle Choisne, Ade Darmawan, Edith Dekyndt, Suzanne Husky, Saodat Ismailova, Suzanne Jackson, Ann Veronica Janssens, Joan Jonas, Pauline Julier, Barbara & Michael Leisgen, Anne Marie Maes, Jumana Manna, Marisa Merz, Jota Mombaça, Nour Mobarak, mountaincutters, Otobong Nkanga, Kicsy Abreu Stable, Precious Okoyomon, Elizabeth A. Povinelli, Annie Ratti, Daniel Steegmann Mangrané, Maarten Vanden Eynde & Musasa, Cecilia Vicuña, and Adrián Villar Rojas.

A catalogue for the exhibition has been published by Mercatorfonds / Fonds Mercator. The book features contributions by all artists as well as texts by Karen Barad, Federico Campagna & Febe Lamiroy, Chris Cyrille-Isaac, Sofia Dati, Vinciane Despret & Letícia Renault, Zayaan Khan, Shayma Nader, Susan Schuppli, and Dirk Snauwaert.

Magical Realism, Imagining Natural Dis/Order is on view through September 28, 2025.

WIELS Contemporary Art Centre