Chambre d'Amis | Kortrijk - Edition 4 - Ria Verhaeghe | 18 October 2025 - 30 January 2026

Chambre d'Amis IV, Kortrijk x Ria Verhaeghe

The fourth edition of "Chambre d'Amis" featured a talk between Ria Verhaeghe and Philippe Van Cauteren, the General Director of S.M.A.K. (Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst) in Ghent, Belgium. Together, they discussed Verhaeghe's long-running project, Provisoria, which has culminated this year in a publication containing over 3,500 archival images.

Thanks to Luc, Mylène, and everyone who participated in creating this lovely fourth edition!

Ria Verhaeghe. Photo credit: Alex Vanhee

ABOUT Ria Verhaeghe

Ria Verhaeghe (b. 1950, Belgium) lives and works in Bruges, Belgium.

For the past three decades, Verhaeghe has collected images from international newspapers, and cataloged them in an image bank which now contains over 60,000 entries. This ongoing database encompasses an enormous range of subjects, and is articulated around three idiosyncratic themes.

This archive is a life’s work in itself, but it is also the “matrix” for other pieces: Verhaeghe transforms some of the found images through various mediums including painting, embroidery, sculpture, and video, reflecting her sensitive approach to stories which, as they enter the realm of mass media, are often emptied of their emotion. In this way, her practice expresses a sense of empathy for the material world, resisting its disappearance as it becomes ever more disembodied and fractured.
BIO

Though Verhaeghe obtained a visual arts degree at the Royal Academy of Kortrijk in 1978, she began her career as a nurse, working in a hospital for some years before devoting herself fulltime to raising her children. During this period, she began developing the threads of care, patience, observation that would follow her throughout her practice. Verhaeghe’s work has been the subject of solo and duo exhibitions including at Be-Part (Waregem, BE); Museum voor Schone Kunsten (Ghent, BE); Galerie C. De Vos (Aalst, BE); Fundació Antoni Tàpies (Barcelona, ES); FOMU – Photo Museum Antwerp (BE); and Huis van Herman Teirlinck (Beersel, BE). Her work has been included in group exhibitions at institutions such as the National Bank of Belgium (Brussels, BE); Museum Dr. Guislain (Ghent, BE); Kunstenfestivaldesarts (Brussels, BE); Cultuurcentrum Brugge (BE); the 5th Biennale of Moscow (RU); the 18th Biennale of Sydney (AU); the Rencontres Internationales Paris/Berlin (FR/DE); and many more. Her first monograph, Provisoria, was published by Art Paper Editions in 2025; it includes texts by Barbara De Coninck and by Philippe Van Cauteren, the director of S.M.A.K - Municipal Museum of Contemporary Art (Ghent, BE).
Philippe Van Cauteren. Photo credit: De Morgen

ABOUT Philippe Van Cauteren

Philippe Van Cauteren (b. 1969, Zele, BE) is a curator and writer known for his reflective approach to contemporary art and its role within society. Since 2005, he has served as General Director of S.M.A.K. (Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst) in Ghent, where he develops exhibitions and collaborations that bridge local and global artistic practices.

Van Cauteren has curated projects across Europe, the Middle East, and Latin America, including the Iraqi Pavilion at the 56th Venice Biennale. His work often focuses on art as a site for attention, vulnerability, and shared responsibility.

He has followed and supported Ria Verhaeghe’s work for many years, recognizing in her practice a profound reflection on care, empathy, and the preservation of human presence through image and gesture.

Throughout his career, Van Cauteren has collaborated with artists such as Artur Żmijewski, Kendell Geers, and Teresa Margolles, while also contributing to critical discourse through writing and lectures that explore the evolving role of the museum in society.
Talk with Philippe Van Cauteren, General Director of S.M.A.K. (Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst)

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photo: Rik Vanevel
Provisoria

Since the early 1990s, Ria Verhaeghe has been collecting images from international newspapers, assembling them into the Provisoria, an alternative image archive that charts the emotional and conceptual possibilities of photojournalism. Organized by keywords, dates, and thematic groupings, the archive preserves only those images that demand attention-those that hint at connections, reveal ambiguities, or invite new interpretations. With over 60,000 images, it spans the dramatic, the grotesque, the tender, and the unexpected.

The archive is divided into three conceptual sections. Human Interest gathers images charged with empathy and emotion, including the series Icarus, Verticals, WWEB, and Trümmerfrauen. Fusion explores the ways we interpret imagery, grouping photographs by symbolic or visual qualities-shadows (simulacre), icons (icon), double images (glende), traces (trace), or the surreal (alien), the aesthetically compelling (beauty), and the energetically charged (move or MUD, "multi-use dimension"). Mindwaves is organized around formal and structural qualities, including packaging (emballage), textures (Fourche, Circle, Amorf, Geometric), and connection (Human, Realea, Strip).

Visit the Provisoria imagebank here.

A book derived from the archive presents a curated selection of over 3,500 images, offering a glimpse into the vast, layered world of the Provisoria-a space where images are not merely preserved, but reimagined, reinterpreted, and brought to life through attention, juxtaposition, and reflection.

More information about the Provisoria book here.
Verticals

Vertical 52.473, 2024

Collage, oil, resin, flower petals and gold leaf on wood, 25 x 19 x 2 cm - 9 7/8 x 7 1/2 x 3/4 in.

The Verticals are a series of paintings on wooden panels covered with gold leaf. Though seemingly abstract, each work originates from newspaper photographs of the deceased, reoriented from horizontal to vertical. In lifting these images from the ground, Verhaeghe transforms them into a gesture of recognition and remembrance. Some panels include dried flower petals from her garden, subtle symbols of hope and life.

The photographs are drawn from the Human Interest section of Provisoria and are grouped as single, mass, and child, reflecting the individual, the collective, and the innocent. The shadowed figures stand vertically against the wall, as if risen, bridging the space between presence and absence.

For Verhaeghe, “vertical” also signals a break in ordinary time—a moment when one notices what might otherwise be overlooked. The Verticals make visible the lives recorded in newspapers, transforming fleeting images into enduring forms of attention, care, and memory.
GLENDEN

4 G VII, 2011

Mixed media, newspaper picture, resin, 16 x 15 cm - 6 1/4 x 5 7/8 in, framed: 32 x 23.5 x 2 cm - 12 5/8 x 9 1/4 x 3/4 in.

The Glenden series—a dyslexic play on the word “legends”—consists of newspaper images layered on both sides of a page. Held against the light, these overlapping images create new relationships and unforeseen meanings in third images. In this recuperative act, Verhaeghe gives presence to what might otherwise vanish—what is lost, overlooked, or forgotten—and transforms it into a fragile, unrecognized present. She observes, provocatively, that “1 plus 1  is  3,” pointing to the emergent possibilities that arise when images, materials, and ideas meet.

Her practice began in the pre-digital era, sourcing printed newspapers whose materiality shapes the work. In Glenden, the interplay of front and back produces forms that could not exist in isolation. She started with De Standaard, later expanding to newspapers containing stock exchange reports, gathered from friends abroad, local hotels, or the College of Europe in Bruges. Through these encounters, she observed cultural differences in imagery—El País often more sensationalist than the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung—a distinction now blurred by the circulation of press agency photographs online.
CUDDLES

CUDDLE, 1997

Textiles, newspaper, latex, silk, 16.5 x 29 x 20 cm - 6 1/2 x 11 3/8 x 7 7/8 in.

Ria Verhaeghe’s Cuddles are composed of one or more newspaper clippings that move her and with which she feels compelled to “do something.” These clippings are wrapped in old garments, often those once worn by her children, then filled with cushion stuffing. A light cotton layer is wound around the form before it is enclosed in sheets of hand-cast latex, stitched together, sometimes several times in succession, to achieve a desired tension and texture.

The materials in Verhaeghe’s work are profoundly evocative of connection - of care, both emotional and conversational (“communi-care”). The organic, skin-like quality of latex ties these works intimately to the body and to convalescence. Commonly used to protect mattresses or to make medical gloves and garments, latex also serves as a sculptural skin - a membrane through which the negative form gives birth to the positive. Its distinctive scent and tactile presence recall, for Verhaeghe, memories of her mother from childhood and, later, her own experiences as a nurse.
CUDDLE (MAMA), 1996 - 1997

Wood, textile, latex, 170 x 90 x 5 cm - 66 7/8 x 35 3/8 x 2 in.

This Cuddle belongs to the series Mama, created after the death of Verhaeghe’s mother, Julitska Hegëdus (Újpest, 1920 - 1992). It is one of the earliest works in this series.

As a child refugee from Hungary, Julitska traveled to Belgium for a humanitarian “curative holiday” in 1926. Though intended to be temporary, she stayed with foster families, returning to Belgium several times before settling in Bruges in 1932. Later, she married Camiel Verhaeghe and raised six children, Ria being the eldest. The artist remembers her mother as “sewn together,” a life pieced from separations, migrations, and acts of love and loyalty, a patchwork of vulnerability and attachment.
COMMEMORATION WORKS

Commemoration Work 1.510, 2019

Pastel, oil, resin, gold leaf and dried petals on paper, 100 x 75 cm - 39 3/8 x 29 1/2 in, framed: 110 x 80 cm - 43 1/4 x 31 1/2 in.

The Commemoration Works comprise newspaper photo collages and/or sewing patterns (once belonged to her mother) on paper, enriched with pastel, oil, resin, and often veiled in gold. Beneath these luminous surfaces, the original images remain partly hidden, their visibility obscured yet still perceptible through the material’s tension. These suspended compositions might be read as gravestones raised skyward, memorials that transform the horizontal image of loss into a vertical gesture of tribute.

In this ongoing series, Verhaeghe commemorates those whose deaths are collectively witnessed yet individually forgotten. Each line, mark, or layer of gold becomes both a concealment and a form of care, a way of registering presence within absence. Her process is one of attentiveness and empathy: to look again, to resist indifference, to restore dignity through the simplest of gestures.
GRAPHS

Graph, Vertical/ Chaos/ Emballage 2021-2022, 2025

Photocopy, oil, gold and umber silk on canvas, 18 x 24 x 2 cm - 7 1/8 x 9 1/2 x 3/4 in.

With the help of one of her sons, Ria Verhaeghe began an online database of the Provisoria, with digital tags of her key words. This allows her – like a poetic statistician – to extract imperfect yet informative data for comparison, or to track the occurrence of certain typologies of image across time through graphs. Verhaeghe notes, for example, that if you look at her graph of Verticals (images of dead people), for 2023, you can see when the genocide in Gaza began.

Verhaeghe embroiders those graphs tracking the Provisoria onto blank paper or canvas, onto second-hand table linen, sometimes over another image. The result can evoke a mountainous landscape of overlapping vertical threads, their colours relating to her different categories. The process of embroidery is also one of deceleration, contemplation and what she terms “empathic thinking”. For Verhaeghe, it evokes women of previous eras left behind at home, embroidering while waiting for news of their loved ones.
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