Brussels Ass Book Fair 2025
28-30 Nov 2025
On the weekend of 28–30 November, Muhka will bring a curated selection of Muhka publications to the Brussels Ass Book Fair at K1 in Brussels.
Organised by the Paris Ass Book Fair and KANAL-Centre Pompidou, the Brussels Ass Book Fair is dedicated to independent art publishing and will host fifty-five exhibitors from Belgium and abroad, complimented by a public programme of live events, music, talks, and some very special projects. The fair gives prominent space to LGBTQIA+ participants and projects, and brings together creators, authors, enthusiasts, and collectives to present books, fanzines, and editions that challenge mainstream norms.
On Saturday 29 November from 4–6 p.m., Elen Braga will personally sign copies of her monograph, published earlier this year by MER. Books. The book is the first extensive overview of the fifteen-year career of the Belgian-Brazilian artist and includes essays by renowned art critics and curators Raphael Fonseca, Laila Melchior, Paulo Miyada, Ilse Roosens and Joanna Zielińska.
Sharon Van Overmeiren will be signing on 30 November from 1:00 to 3:00 p.m. For the previous Art’s Birthday (2025), she created a sculpture that we ritually burned together with our audience.
Jacuzzi of Despair
Sharon Van Overmeiren
There are countless ways to interpret death, and The Jacuzzi of Despair does not aim to add to them. Instead, it fizzes, swirls, weeps, and sweeps—an unsettled current of images and arrangements, placing Sharon Van Overmeiren’s sculptures within a strange narrative of mortality and rebirth. Born from a collaboration with graphic designer Nana Esi, the publication refracts Sharon’s work through a series of familiar yet elusive aesthetic mechanisms: from the speculative and ritualistic to the archival and surreal, from the encyclopaedic urge to categorise, to the spectacle of commercial catchphrases. As such, The Jacuzzi of Despair navigates and distorts the symbolic structures by which we typically frame life and death, suggesting a new order wherein their ineffable dimensions do not stand apart but fold seamlessly into one another. What emerges is a disorienting artifact, a publication both buoyant and weighty, performing a slippery, playful, and evocative attempt to grasp the mechanisms by which we make sense of life—only to dissolve them into incoherence, creating the conditions for new meanings to take root.
Published by Zolo Press on the occasion occasion at Cultuurhuis De Warande, Turnhout, in 2025.
Published in 2025 ┊ 112 pages ┊ Hardcover ┊ Language: English
“Sharon van Overmeiren’s sculpted tombstone shrines. These embellished memorial-slabs frame portraits of plush teddy animals, calling in on circumstances where apparent “inanimate” objects – typically denied to hold any form of life – undergo an event similar to what we know as death. But in rubbing our eyes free of tears, we notice these teddy-portraits also hold within them a commercial aura. There’s a polished feel to their image, resembling product-shots selling things yet-to-be purchased. Far from an authentic post – mortem memorial, these portraits gesture a marketing intent – as though the dead are being adverted back to us in their fresh form. What kind of twisted tombstone is this, memorialising as much as it markets?”
Saskia Smith – damienandtheloveguru.com
