Twenty years of collaboration: Arocha & Schraenen in dialogue

With Carla Arocha & Stéphane Schraenen — 20 Years and More: Works from the Collection, M HKA highlights a distinctive chapter from its collection. The presentation not only shows a selection of key works, but above all makes visible a practice that has developed in dialogue over more than twenty years.

That dialogue unfolds on several levels: between two artists, between individual trajectories and a shared practice, and between artwork, space and viewer.

From individual trajectories to a shared practice

Carla Arocha and Stéphane Schraenen each begin from a distinctly personal background. Arocha, born in Caracas and trained in Chicago, has developed a practice in which the legacy of Op Art and kinetic art is linked to an almost scientific approach to perception. Her work explores how minimal interventions — in colour, light and rhythm — guide and transform our perception.

Schraenen brings a multifaceted practice, rooted in the Antwerp art context and nourished by experience in graphic design, radio, scenography and film, among other fields. This broad background translates into a conceptual approach in which space, materiality and the active role of the viewer are central.

Since 2006, they have developed a shared practice in which individual authorship increasingly recedes into the background. What emerges is not the sum of two oeuvres, but a shared way of thinking, analysing and visualising — a coherent and consistent artistic position.

The collection as a place of encounter

The presentation at M HKA makes that evolution tangible. You see works that focus on light, perception and the role of the viewer. Among them are Screen by Carla Arocha and Sleeping Room by Stéphane Schraenen, which is presented in the collection here for the first time. Persiana, a screen print from the installation of the same name in their first joint project, marks an early moment in their collaboration.

In this way, an arc of tension emerges from early collaboration to recent work, with room in between for their individual practices as well.

In the round gallery you see Landscape (Antwerp) (2026), a new large-scale installation donated to the museum by the artists. In this work, Arocha and Schraenen translate the colour scheme of an Antwerp city view into monumental planes of colour and mirrors. These capture light, movement and surroundings, while at the same time fragmenting what they reflect, so that the viewer also becomes part of the work. Always different, depending on position, speed and perspective.

As a viewer, you suddenly become a fragmented person in a fragmented reality. You begin to question how you perceive yourself and your surroundings: what do I see, what do I think I see, and who am I actually?”

The collection appears here not as a static whole, but as a dynamic field in which works generate new meanings in relation to one another. This approach aligns with the broader way in which M HKA presents its collection. Under the title De toestand is vloeibaar, the collection is shown as a constantly changing whole, in which a number of key works are brought into dialogue with international voices and current questions. Seasonal presentations shift emphases and perspectives, thereby keeping the relationship with today’s world open.

Reflection, publication and documentation

At the basis of this collection presentation is the publication of Carla Arocha and Stéphane Schraenen Monograph As Project, with Barbara Vanderlinden as lead author and editor-in-chief and design by Irma Boom. The book brings together around five hundred works and forms an extensive reflection on their shared practice.

Parallel to this publication, the documentary 1+1=3 (2026) is also on view at M HKA, Carla Arocha and Stéphane Schraenen: 20 Years and More, a film by Alex Salinas that was co-financed by the museum. The film offers an insight into their artistic practice and into the process that underpins this monograph.

A practice that keeps moving

What this exhibition and the publication surrounding it make clear is that the practice of Arocha and Schraenen resists being fixed. It remains in motion and invites an active form of looking — a way of looking that is at the same time revised: of space, of perception and of the position of the viewer.

At the same time, the presentation shows how a museum collection not only preserves, but also activates. By bringing works together again and placing them in dialogue, space is created for new insights.

An invitation to look and think

With 20 Years and More, M HKA invites you to an attentive, slowed-down way of looking. Not as a complete overview of an artistic practice, but as a concentrated approach to it through a number of key works — as an exercise in perception itself.

It is precisely there — in that shift in perspective — that the enduring strength of Arocha’s and Schraenens’s oeuvre lies.