BRUSSELS.- Suchan Kinoshita, winner of the BelgianArtPrize 2025, presents a new body of work at Bozar. With her exhibition, Renovation, Kinoshita takes over the Antechambers of the Centre for Fine Arts in Brussels, creating a subtle interplay between objects, natural light, sound and spatial perception.

Suchan Kinoshita (Tokyo, 1960) studied in Germany and the Netherlands. She has lived and worked in Brussels since 2012. For more than thirty-five years, the artist has created projects and exhibitions that challenge our expectations and disrupt our perceptions.

Kinoshita's work encompasses an impressive variety of media and techniques: sculptures, installations, videos, sound creations, performances and more. Her work also includes elements of theatre and experimental music, two fields in which the artist has long been active. Time and the role of the spectator are also two important aspects of her work. Kinoshita does not focus on specific themes, but rather invites the viewer to ‘read between the lines.’ She sees her work as a space that engages with the works themselves and with the ‘spectator’.

This ‘staging’ is also tangible in Renovation, where Kinoshita has transformed or reactivated various elements already present in the exhibition space: “Taking over the Antechambers of the Centre for Fine Arts was an inspiring challenge. First of all, I reopened spaces that were previously sealed off, I brought back natural light - where some of the windows had been blacked out - and I made the historic entrance on the Rue Royale accessible again.”

Alberta Sessa, the exhibition's curatorial coordinator, explains that “antechamber generally refers to spaces of introduction, or spaces in which to wait before entering the main rooms of a house. They are also linked to the ‘genkan’, the intermediary space that gives access to the Japanese home, and which is a recurring theme and focus of attention in the artist’s work.

She adds: ‘Many of the works in the Renovation exhibition have emerged over the course of a long period of transformation in which the space has become a temporary workshop for deconstruction, inventory, and creation.

Suchan Kinoshita wanted to reuse some of the scenographic elements from the previous exhibition at Bozar. For several weeks, she dismantled panels, salvaged wood, ripped out nails, peeled off coverings and even collected dust. These recovered materials were used to make some of her new creations, which she calls “Platzhalter”: intermediate objects that bridge the gap between an initial function and a new one.

Emily Joyce Evans, Associate Researcher at the Neue Nationalgalerie (Berlin), explains: “Upon entering Kinoshita's exhibitions, the viewer is frequently first confronted by the artist's choice of materials. Fibre, wood, plastics or other artificial elements [...] can suggest an unfinished state, perpetual construction or postponed decisions.”

These unconventional materials challenge our perception of Kinoshita's work, which refuses categorisation and embraces ambiguity.

Joyce Evans adds: “Kinoshita employs materials and objects in a way that poses questions, rather than answering them Her choices are often deceptively plain, as objects are employed in a manner that makes them neither sculpture nor prop.”

The exhibition at Bozar also features a series of drawings inspired by the manga of Hokusai shown in the only room deprived of daylight, where a new doorway leading to an area at the rear has been opened back up. Other works on paper, subject to the constant variation of natural light, unfurl and unfold across old shelving —now freshly integrated into a brand new structure—or find their place on the walls or in the adjacent room, where the meteorological dimension of the weather merges with the philosophical dimension of Time.

Alberta Sessa adds: “Whether depicted in graphite, pencil, or gouache on the kind of paper normally intended for wrapping food, or recomposed from the boards, these ‘inventory works’ and the remaining traces of the building end up revealing themselves simultaneously, allowing visitors the opportunity to make them their own. As the works have grown over the course of several weeks, their presence has become a concrete and sensorial archive of the space.”