Chambre d'Amis | Brussels - Edition 6 - Orso Caël

Orso Caël lives and works between Brussels, Belgium and Paris, France. 

Caël is a visual artist and poet working across film, photography, and text, exploring themes of marginality, resistance, and re-enchantment. Their work takes the city as stage and subject: they wander the built environment, capturing images with a painterly attention to light – the sun shifts through an intersection, reflects from a glass screen, shimmers in water droplets. These moments of beauty are interwoven with a sense of unease, as the artist similarly observes and responds to the social and ecological crises of our time. While they acknowledge the decline of our contemporary structures, Caël resists cynicism, drawing inspiration from thinkers such as Pier Paolo Pasolini and Georges Didi-Huberman. Instead, they seek out the vitality and joy emerging from the cracks, experimenting with their practice to find alternative, poetic spaces of emancipation.

Dirk Snauwaert, founding artistic director of WIELS, has built a career around shaping platforms where contemporary art operates as both cultural production and civic infrastructure. His practice consistently foregrounds the institution not as a passive container, but as an active framework for critical exchange, artistic experimentation, and public engagement.

He first emerged within the Brussels art ecosystem as curator of contemporary art at BOZAR between 1989 and 1995, contributing to a broader redefinition of the city’s contemporary art landscape during a formative period of internationalization. He subsequently led Kunstverein München and later served as co artistic director of the Institut d’Art Contemporain, where he played a key role in expanding and articulating the vision of the FRAC Rhône Alpes collection.

Under Snauwaert’s direction, WIELS has developed a program recognized for its rigorous curatorial approach and sustained dialogue with artists whose practices interrogate history, representation, and social structures. Major exhibitions with artists such as Luc Tuymans, Francis Alÿs, Rosemarie Trockel, and Joëlle Tuerlinckx reflect a long horizon approach to artistic research and institutional discourse.

Beyond WIELS, his curatorial projects include the Belgian Pavilion presentation of Jef Geys at the 53rd Venice Biennale and Atopolis, the transnational exhibition developed for Mons 2015, both of which extended his ongoing interest in art’s relationship to territory, migration, and collective narratives.