Turning into Ancestors is a collective exhibition that seeks to supply an expanded understanding of ancestrality. It brings collectively Western and Indigenous artists who discover ancestral reminiscences: their fragmentation, repression, persistence and imaginative potential. By way of their work, the artists ask what it means to be related or disconnected from our ancestors, and the way each experiences may function a place to begin for imagining completely different futures.
Traditionally, ancestrality has been intently tied to Indigenous cosmologies and the way they have a look at reminiscence, land and time as non-linear. Reclaiming it has been a significant a part of their id and resistance after centuries of dispossession. Western cultures have lengthy been fascinated by this completely different type of information manufacturing and transmission, as a result of it challenges the very ideologies they’ve created and exported. But this fascination typically turns into exoticization, as if ancestral connections and information solely belong to Indigenous communities—denying its presence and prospects for the West itself.
Whereas the artists introduced on this exhibition share a typical deal with ancestrality, the questions at stake are profoundly completely different. For Indigenous artists, like Subash Thebe Limbu and Rana Nazzal Hamadeh, ancestrality is a dwelling observe of resistance and survival rooted within the tasks of transmission. Their works discover how ancestral information may be honored in ways in which maintain lands, languages and lineages. They ask how the act of remembering can proceed to information communities by the lasting impacts of colonialism and environmental destruction, and the way transmission may be safeguarded for these but to come back.
For Western artists, explorations of ancestrality take a number of kinds. Some, corresponding to Miguel Peres dos Santos, start from loss—the sense of forgetting, rupture, or complicity in inherited, colonial violence. They discover how descendants of colonizers may turn into higher ancestors, and the way at the moment’s realities have been formed by the goals of colonial powers and long-gone ancestors. Others, together with Els Dietvorst and Lou Le Forban, work at unearthing suppressed information—people practices, pagan traditions, and native knowledge erased or marginalized over time—asking how reconnecting with these traces can restore misplaced connections.
It’s inside this area of questioning—of friction, connection, and dialogue between distinct histories and urgencies—that Turning into Ancestors seeks to generate dialogue. The exhibition is an invite to mirror on the legacies that form us, each individually and collectively. On the similar time, it gives a name to reimagine futures by aware selections somewhat than inherited patterns.
With works by: Julien Creuzet, Chloë Delanghe & Mattijs Driesen, Els Dietvorst, Forensic Structure & Salman Abu Sitta, Laura Huertas Millán, Lou Le Forban, MUXX collective (EYIBRA, Oldo Erréve, Lukas Avendaño, nnux), Rana Nazzal Hamadeh, Miguel Peres Dos Santos, Subash Thebe Limbu.
The exhibition opens festively on Saturday, February 7 (6–9pm) and runs till Sunday, June 28, 2026. argos gives free guided excursions each final Sunday of the month from February to June, extra particulars may be discovered on our web site.
About argos
argos is a centre for audiovisual arts, based mostly in Brussels. We have a good time artist movies and movies by exhibitions, collections, public programming, distribution and our library. House to Belgium’s largest assortment of artist’s transferring picture works, we discover the previous, illuminate the current and, along with our group, form the way forward for audiovisual arts.
