Every Sunday, Belga English picks its favourite events from the cultural agenda. This week: Wozzeck shakes society awake, looking to the future through magical realism and the connective tissue in art between Antwerp and Rotterdam.
Wozzeck, 1 – 29 June, Opera Ballet Vlaanderen
“The most audacious opera of the 20th century,” Wozzeck, will close Opera Ballet Vlaanderen’s season. Inspired by a true story, Alan Berg’s groundbreaking first opera follows a soldier spiraling into madness, crushed by poverty, humiliation and relentless exploitation. Trapped between an indifferent military, a manipulative doctor and a partner’s betrayal, Wozzeck’s grip on reality fractures. Hallucinations blur into violence, culminating in the murder of Marie, the mother of his child. Wracked with guilt, he drowns as he is trying to hide the weapon, all the while his son continues playing, innocent to the surrounding events.
“The music deliberately wants to attack by pushing us into an unpleasant reality, and Wozzeck says things that we should take seriously,” says director Johan Simons. “’Berg’s music succeeds in organically representing a feeling of life that is very recognizable for our time. It expresses a disquiet and a restlessness that fit the abominable state of the world. It shakes us awake to take action.”
Magical Realism: Imagining Natural Dis/order 29 May – 28 September, WIELS, Brussels
Over thirty artists come together at WIELS and argos to explore how we might reimagine living in a world marked by ecological crisis and planetary change. The exhibition invites a shift away from extractive systems toward deeper entanglements with the biosphere.
Borrowing from the literary genre of magical realism, where myth and dream blur with everyday life, the show asks how this merging of the rational and the intuitive might offer new responses to climate collapse, monocultures and precarious futures. Through painting, video, sound and installation, artists explore diverse terrains: from galaxies and laboratories to sinking cities and bacterial ecosystems.
The exhibition questions how to heal the rift between scientific reason and mythic imagination, offering artistic visions as tools for repair. Works trace both the fractures and the possibilities within our relationship to the natural world, using both speculative and analytical approaches.
The opening night on 28 May features an artist talk and DJ sets by performers from Belgium and Brazil, blending house, baile funk, amapiano and breakbeats into a celebratory sonic landscape that mirrors the exhibition’s expansive, cross-genre spirit.
Trailblazers of the Abstract, 29 May to 7 September, KMSKA
The Nieuwe Instituut in Rotterdam and the Royal Museum of Fine Arts Antwerp (KMSKA) are launching a joint exhibition exploring two avant-garde movements: the Dutch De Stijl, founded by Theo van Doesburg, and Antwerp’s Modern Art Circle, led by Jozef Peeters. Opening 29 May in Antwerp, the show features 32 key works from the Nieuwe Instituut’s collection.
© COLLECTION NIEUWE INSTITUUT PHOTO JOHANNES SCHWARTZ
The exhibition centers on Van Doesburg’s 1926 interior model for Café l’Aubette, a striking example of abstract design. Inspired by the pan-European dialogues sparked by Futurism, curators Adriaan Gonnissen (KMSKA) and Elza van den Berg (Nieuwe Instituut) conceived this exhibition to highlight similar cross-border exchange between De Stijl and its Antwerp counterpart.
Van Doesburg’s 1920 lecture in Antwerp, Classical, Baroque, Modern, anchors the show’s narrative, showcasing shared ideals about geometric abstraction as a transformative force. The exhibition includes architectural models, graphic and furniture design, and theoretical studies by artists like Van Doesburg, Gerrit Rietveld and J J P Oud.
Works from the KMSKA collection by Antwerp artists such as Peeters, George Vantongerloo and Huib Hoste offer insight into the city’s lesser-known but influential role in the European avant-garde. Together, the two movements envisioned abstraction as a universal language capable of reshaping both art and society.
