Electric Green Parakeets (and other International Brusselaars): Group Show

Featuring work by Haseeb Ahmed, Rebecca Jane Arthur, Marcin Dudek, Ermias Kifleyesus, Camille Orso Cael (fka - Camille Picquot), Angyvir Padilla, Yoel Pytowski, Mostafa Saifi Rahmouni.

With a special contribution by Lot Lemm.

Opening: Saturday, June 14, 2025, 15:00- 19:00

Exhibition: June 14- July 12, 2025

A West African parakeet perched in a cold Ixelles treetop is as Belgian as any other Brusselaar – unexpectedly and entirely. Though you wouldn’t have found these birds in Belgium before the 1970s, today they’re among the most common in Brussels, right after pigeons and sparrows. After more than half a century, are these parakeets as Belgian as they are African or Asian? Are the dozens clustered in the treetops above Flagey truly “from” here?

“Being from” is slippery to define. Like birds, and most other species, humans migrate. We are shaped as much by the places we leave as by those we arrive in. Each day, we build the spaces around us with fragments of our past, weaving the present landscape from a vast and tangled system of roots. In the great stew of contemporary life, people carry many origins within them; perhaps it is more accurate to say that a place is "from" its inhabitants, rather than the other way around.

Brussels is a mid-sized city sculpted by immense diversity, intimate contrasts, and contradictions so vivid they verge on the surreal. More than 100 languages are spoken here, by people hailing from over 180 countries. Nearly half the city’s population was born abroad, and among those born here, many trace family histories that stretch across continents. So what does it mean to be a Brusselaar (or a Belgian) today? What makes a parakeet, or a piece of art, Belgian? 

"Electric Green Parakeets (and Other International Brusselaars)" brings together eight artists who were born elsewhere but have made Brussels their home. Their voices have become part of this city’s evolving landscape, slowly shaped by the influence of Belgian art history and sharpened through sustained engagement with the contemporary ecosystem of residencies, institutions, academies, galleries, and civic life. They are not just “from” somewhere else – they are also shaping where we are now, and what will become of it.

The exhibition builds on questions and concepts from the gallery’s 2022 exhibition “A Place for the Affections: Dwelling in Anguish (torment) and Love”; notions of home and home hauntedness, displacement, migration, and shared identity.