Becoming Ancestors

Becoming Ancestors is a collective exhibition that seeks to offer an expanded understanding of ancestrality. It brings together Western and Indigenous artists who explore ancestral memories: their fragmentation, repression, persistence and imaginative potential. Through their work, the artists ask what it means to be connected or disconnected from our ancestors, and how both experiences might serve as a starting point for imagining different futures.

Historically, ancestrality has been closely tied to Indigenous cosmologies and how they look at memory, land and time as non-linear. Reclaiming it has been a vital part of their identity and resistance after centuries of dispossession. Western cultures have long been fascinated by this different form of knowledge production and transmission, because it challenges the very ideologies they have created and exported. Yet this fascination often turns into exoticization, as if ancestral connections and knowledge only belong to Indigenous communities—denying its presence and possibilities for the West itself.

While the artists presented in this exhibition share a common focus on ancestrality, the questions at stake are profoundly different. For Indigenous artists, like Subash Thebe Limbu and Rana Nazzal Hamadeh, ancestrality is a living practice of resistance and survival rooted in the responsibilities of transmission. Their works explore how ancestral knowledge can be honored in ways that sustain lands, languages and lineages. They ask how the act of remembering can continue to guide communities through the lasting impacts of colonialism and environmental destruction, and how transmission can be safeguarded for those yet to come. 

For Western artists, explorations of ancestrality take multiple forms. Some, such as Miguel Peres dos Santos, begin from loss—the sense of forgetting, rupture, or complicity in inherited, colonial violence. They explore how descendants of colonizers might become better ancestors, and how today’s realities have been shaped by the dreams of colonial powers and long-gone ancestors. Others, including Els Dietvorst and Lou Le Forban, work at unearthing suppressed knowledge—folk practices, pagan traditions, and local wisdom erased or marginalized over time—asking how reconnecting with these traces can restore lost connections.

It is within this space of questioning—of friction, connection, and dialogue between distinct histories and urgencies—that Becoming Ancestors seeks to generate dialogue. The exhibition is an invitation to reflect on the legacies that shape us, both individually and collectively. At the same time, it offers a call to reimagine futures through conscious choices rather than inherited patterns.

With works by: Julien Creuzet, Chloë Delanghe & Mattijs Driesen, Els Dietvorst, Forensic Architecture & 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 until Sunday, June 28, 2026. argos offers free guided tours every last Sunday of the month from February to June, more details can be found on our website. 

About argos 
argos is a centre for audiovisual arts, based in Brussels. We celebrate artist films and videos through exhibitions, collections, public programming, distribution and our library. Home to Belgium’s largest collection of artist’s moving image works, we explore the past, illuminate the present and, together with our community, shape the future of audiovisual arts.