GHENT.- Until June 7, KIOSK presents a new solo exhibition by Hisae Ikenaga. With Anatomies of Use, the Mexican-Japanese artist brings together an ensemble of sculptures, assemblages, and collages in which industrial materials and everyday objects are reworked into hybrid forms. Reworked materials and ceramic fragments come together in a visual language that balances between functionality and stillness, between the familiar and the estranging.

Since the 2000s, Ikenaga has developed a practice based on collecting, relocating, and recomposing objects. By removing them from their original context, she questions their use, meaning, and history. In her work, standardized production collides with artisanal processes, resulting in sculptures that are at once solid and fragile, moving between utility and contemplation.

For this exhibition, she presents a series of recent works, including Black Artichoke, Industrial Ruines, and Restes Morcelés. Ceramic forms are opened, cut, or stacked into incomplete structures, while industrial elements lose their function and take on a new, poetic charge.

In the Anatomical Theatre of KIOSK, located within KASK & Conservatory, the exhibition gains a particular historical resonance. Where the space once served for medical dissection and the transmission of knowledge, it now functions as a site for artistic education. This shift echoes in Ikenaga’s practice, in which forms are opened, dissected, and reassembled.This approach extends into Soft Dissection, a new video made in collaboration with film director Paula Onet, where artisanal and medical gestures intersect, opening an ambiguous space between workshop and laboratory, and where each form becomes trace, sculpture, and question.

Born in Mexico City in 1977 to a family of Japanese origin, based in Europe for more than twenty years and currently living in Luxembourg, Hisae Ikenaga has developed an artistic language that unfolds at the intersection of design, archaeology, and surrealism. She studied art theory and visual arts in Mexico, Kyoto, Barcelona, and Madrid. Her work reveals a fascination with the afterlife of manufactured objects: their programmed obsolescence, their capacity for transformation, and their potential to host new forms of life. Each sculpture embodies a tension between the industrial and the handmade, between the cold logic of production and the fragile warmth of the human hand.