This time last year, An Institution is not an Island took place at KASK & Conservatorium in Ghent. The project responded to a deanery meeting room on campus filled with portraits and busts depicting central figures in the institution’s history — all men, with a portrait of former director Chantal De Smet as the only exception. Emerging from this context, An Institution is not an Island invited Sanie Irsay, Nikolay Karabinovych, Celine Aernoudt and Lázara Rosell Albear to develop site-specific artistic interventions in this room and other spaces across campus, as an opportunity to collectively question institutional, historical, infrastructural and spatial hierarchies.
As a response to the art academy’s historically limited archival record of female students, the project was documented throughout and formed a short film of the same title. The film, situated somewhere in between a vlog and a documentary, captures the month-long behind-the-scenes of installing each intervention at KASK & Conservatorium throughout May 2025. It highlights the project as a collaborative, collective process shaped by encounters and conversations, reflecting on the notion of an ‘intervention’ as not only a singular act or final presentation, but a continuous gesture of negotiation, adaptation, and engagement.
In Komplot, the film will be shown in a continuous loop over three days and extended spatially, with echoes of each artistic intervention reactivated in Komplot. This marks the first presentation of the film in Brussels, as well as the first public presentation of the interventions’ resonances. A collective reading moment will take place during the vernissage on 3 June, exploring texts that were integral to the research behind the project.
On ‘An Institution is not an Island’
Film screening and retrospective exhibition
With Sanie Irsay, Nikolay Karabinovych, Celine Aernoudt and Lázara Rosell Albear
Curated by Bethan Burnside, Miranda Pastor and Flora Bonneure Vanclooster
‘An Institution is not an Island’ at KASK & Conservatorium was additionally curated by Maartje Claes, Hanna Julia Erdosi and Tuta Say
Vernissage 03.06
18:00-22:00
With introduction of the curators and a first screening of the film
Open for view 04-05.06
14:00-18:00