Program 2026

NW in Aalst is an open house for contemporary art and film along the city’s quays, where artists, audiences, and communities convene in practices of collaboration and exchange. Over the course of 2026, the program traces intersections between local and global, practice and research, sound and politics. Across exhibitions, film, and public programs, NW foregrounds artistic development while engaging the city, the region, and broader transnational currents. This year, the program emphasizes multiplicity—plural forms of authorship, dissent, listening and collectivity—through a series of exhibitions, commissions, and events that investigate how art can enact, challenge, and reimagine social, political, and aesthetic infrastructures.

Spring exhibitions

Pauline Curnier Jardin: Dress to Kill
Until Sunday, March 27, 2026

In Dress to Kill, French artist Pauline Curnier Jardin (b. 1980, Marseille) examines clothing as a site of political negotiation and subversive potential. The exhibition assembles recent installations and films to consider costume, disguise, and performativity as strategies of resistance, identity formation, and self-representation. Developed in close collaboration with residents of Aalst, the exhibition centers on Jeanet Film Adulte, a new commissioned film, co-produced with Steirischer Herbst, that enacts these concerns in narrative and material form.

Public program
Building on the exhibition’s inquiries, the public program frames feminist, queer, and mythopoetic perspectives within broader cinematic lineages. Screenings span the rarefied works of Le Nemesiache, cult films by Brian De Palma and Jean Cocteau, and activist queer cinema such as Criminal Queers, alongside programs like The Big Hormone Party, tracing intersections of cultural critique, experimental form, and collective imagination.

Pauline Curnier Jardin on Dress to Kill

Melissa Mabesoone: I’m fine, maturing 
Opening: Friday, February 27, 2026
Exhibition: February 28–April 26, 2026

I’m fine, maturing is a solo exhibition by Melissa Mabesoone. Across two rooms, a mutable universe unfolds in which characters slip effortlessly between roles, temporalities and bodies, with a fluidity that recalls Virginia Woolf’s Orlando or Cher’s one-woman performance of West Side Story.

Summer exhibitions

Opening: Friday, May 22, 2026
Exhibition: May 23–September 20, 2026

Songs of Dissent 
Andrius Arutiunian, Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme, Julian Abraham ‘Togar’, Aline Bouvy, Roy Köhnke, among others.

Songs of Dissent revisits punk’s cry of “no future,” once the voice of a generation adrift, now a lens on climate collapse, political erosion, and entrenched inequality. The exhibition traces how punk’s crisis-born energy persists in contemporary art, especially in sound-based practices that leak, escape, and bear witness where images flatten or fail. By linking Aalst’s underground scenes to broader realities of dispossession and violence, the project also confronts punk’s blind spots, where exclusion mirrored the very structures it opposed. Revisiting these local histories underscores that dissent is not imported but vernacular, and ongoing.

Co-productions with Kunstenfestivaldesarts and Moderna Museet 

Dennis Tyfus: Patronizing Exercises in Reasoning
In Patronizing Exercises in Reasoning, Dennis Tyfus presents a three-part installation at NW that revolves around ‘No Choice’. By embracing constraint as a creative and playful framework, Tyfus examines how rules and structures shape—or free—choices and behaviors, bringing hospitality, improvisation, and media critique together while activating NW’s legacy of DIY culture and participation.

Info~Angel: Smurfpunx Against Militarism
On April 2, 1988, Netwerk Aalst hosted a chaotic punk benefit against militarism. Bands from Belgium, the UK, and Germany performed alongside zines, fundraisers, and grassroots activism, supporting conscientious objectors facing legal persecution. Smurfpunx captures a moment where music, politics, and DIY networks converged—punk as infrastructure for action, solidarity, and resistance. Decades later, its energy and questions about militarization and refusal remain urgent.

July 20–August 9: summer closure

Fall exhibitions

Opening: Friday, October 16, 2026
Exhibition: October 17, 2026–March, 2027

Subversive Film: Exercise in Assembling 
Exercise in Assembling is a project by Subversive Film, the Brussels- and Ramallah-based artist collective. Grounded in archival research, montage, and practices of recirculation, the exhibition addresses film as an open document in which histories of struggle, memory, and collectivity remain in motion and are continually studied and reassembled. The exhibition will be complemented by a film screening and a public program.

In collaboration with de Appel, Amsterdam

HERMANY 
NW presents HERMANY as a living archive: a constantly shifting constellation of projects and encounters that Marlie Mul has developed over recent years, alongside her artistic practice, as an alternative economy of showing, sharing and togetherness.

Info~Angel: Street Action of Werner Kausch
In 1971, German artist Werner Kausch staged his striking Street Action in Aalst, making prints of the city’s manhole covers alongside passers-by—a performance that inaugurated the New Reform Gallery’s dynamic program of events. 

Artists in Development
Saddie Choua, Anne Reijniers, Omar A. Chowdhury, Bebe Books, Laura Huertas Millán

NW supports artists through sustained research, mentoring, and production. Rather than emphasizing short-term visibility, the program offers time, space, and critical dialogue, enabling artists to develop new work in close relation to NW’s exhibitions, film programs, and local contexts.

Ongoing program

Lokaal Dendy: Kitchen Stories and Lokaal Solidair 
Lokaal Dendy is NW’s ground-floor space, combining a café, open kitchen, and adaptable areas for work, play, talks and workshops. It serves as a dynamic platform for the circulation of ideas, practices, and solidarities. At the core of Lokaal Dendy is Kitchen Stories, a program that extends beyond food preparation to engage with the cultural, political, and ecological dimensions of harvesting and cooking. 

In parallel, Lokaal Solidair—a program line within Lokaal Dendy—envisions solidarity as a lived, ongoing practice. This counter-space amplifies the voices of resistance and resilience, particularly those from Palestine and other communities facing displacement and occupation, through screenings, workshops, and gatherings that create space for connection, reflection, and action.

NW Cinema 
Our film program is grounded in the same mission of artistic development. To us, film is a realm for exchange, dialogue and community building. Collaborating with artists, curators, partners and local residents, we curate thematic focus programs ranging from artist films and documentaries to archival films and art-house cinema. 

NW is supported by Flanders State of the Art and the City of Aalst.