May 30, 2026–January 10, 2027
Keep a promise
May 30–October 11, 2026
Chambres d'Amis turns 40
S.M.A.K. celebrates the 40th anniversary of Chambres d’Amis, the groundbreaking exhibition in which Jan Hoet took contemporary art beyond the museum walls. Fifty-one international artists presented their work in the living rooms, stair halls, or bedrooms of private homes across Ghent. Three contemporary artists reflect on the past and look to the future by each developing a contemporary response to Chambres d’Amis within the museum walls.
How do you display works originally conceived for specific, non-institutional settings? In response to this question, S.M.A.K. invites Heike Pallanca, Haim Steinbach and Susanne Kriemann to each design a museum gallery from within their own artistic practice, thereby creating a new in-situ environment. Their interventions do not reconstruct the original exhibition, far from it, but rather create new proposals to look at the 1986 works again in a contemporary way.
The exhibition is framed by an archival presentation that situates the historical importance of Chambres d’Amis. At the centre of this archival display, S.M.A.K. reinstates the iconic work ‘Le Décor et son Double’ by Daniel Buren, which was one of the most critical interventions towards the curatorial concept of Chambres d’Amis.
Carole Vanderlinden: Keep a promise
Belgian artist Carole Vanderlinden presents a selection of paintings and works on paper from the past five years in her first museum solo exhibition at S.M.A.K.
Carole Vanderlinden’s paintings and works on paper immediately capture the imagination. Their power lies in how diversity is freely approached and foregrounded. Her work is simple and compact yet highly layered at the same time. In the creative process, the artist works without a preconceived plan. Depending on the materials, colour and rhythm, she allows compositions to develop gradually on paper or canvas. In this process, she draws on images from her personal memories, details from her research notebooks, and references to art history, literature, music and philosophy. In unexpected yet deliberate ways, she creates new connections and patterns that resist a single, unambiguous meaning.
Coinciding with the exhibition, the first comprehensive monograph on the artist's work is being published by Zolo Press. The publication brings together an extensive selection of works from the past twenty-five years and features contributions by Jean-Philippe Toussaint, Joëlle Léandre, Ory Dessau, Ann Hoste, and Hans den Hartog Jager. The book is produced with the support of Karma, New York.
