Stef Van Looveren — COSMIC BODY – First Incision

17.01.2026, 19:00 – Performance OPUS II, as part of Art’s Birthday

M HKA presents a new site-specific installation and performance by Belgian multidisciplinary artist Stef Van Looveren as part of the IN SITU programme. The project treats the museum space as a hybrid of temple, body, and alchemical laboratory, focusing on material transformation—melting, merging, and mirroring—as a way to explore change as both ritual and embodied experience.

The performance OPUS II (17.01.2026) opens the exhibition and forms the work’s first chapter. Instead of encountering a completed installation, visitors witness a space constructed in real time through a ritualised procession in which performers carry and activate objects. This process establishes the spatial and symbolic framework of the exhibition, setting the logic that guides its later configuration.

At the core of Van Looveren’s vocabulary is a triad of sound-producing sculptural forms. Drawing on organ-like structures, egg and seed shapes, bell forms, and elemental vessels, these sculptures connect to alchemical ideas of matter as both physical and symbolic. Light interacting with silvered surfaces creates shifting reflections, while movement by performers and visitors abstracts figurative references and opens themes of life cycles, decay, and renewal. The installation loosely echoes the structure of a Tree of Life, suggesting an interconnected system of forms and energies.

The work invites visitors into an interior, introspective space where social conditioning can be questioned. Van Looveren describes this as a form of “shadow work,” exploring what remains when inherited roles and identities lose their hold. Alchemical processes—dissolution, transformation, reconfiguration—serve as metaphors for fluid identity, queerness, and the refusal of binary thinking.

References to cyborg bodies, androgyny, and intersex embodiments highlight the capacity for continual metamorphosis. Silvered bodies suggest medical, futuristic, and sacred resonances at once—part operation, part machine, part divine.

Sound functions as a structural element. The music operates like a mantra built on repetition, echoing cycles of life. The sequence begins with the artist’s voice—both vulnerable and identity-forming—linking sound to gender expression, healing, and power. The voice expands through bells, tuned objects, and live instruments.

Throughout the exhibition, materials shift and surfaces melt, keeping the installation in a state of flux. This reflects Van Looveren’s wider practice, which challenges fixed notions of the body and embraces continual transformation. The result is a space of ongoing becoming—open-ended, reflective, and grounded in the physical presence of bodies, sound, and materials.

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About the artist

Stef Van Looveren is a Belgian multidisciplinary artist working across performance, video, sculpture, and installation. Their practice explores gender identity, queerness, and the performative nature of the body, often using humour, camp aesthetics, and prosthetic objects to question how identities are formed, constrained, and liberated.

About the artist

Stef Van Looveren is a Belgian multidisciplinary artist working across performance, video, sculpture, and installation. Their practice explores gender identity, queerness, and the performative nature of the body, often using humour, camp aesthetics, and prosthetic objects to question how identities are formed, constrained, and liberated.

About IN SITU

M HKA’s IN SITU programme invites international artists to create new site-specific works in the museum’s unique space. The programme supports experimentation and highlights pioneering voices within contemporary art.