OUR GRADUATES
imprisoned (by) freedom (2026)
Starting from my own experience of feeling restricted in a seemingly free society I explore fenced sports fields within the city of Brussels. In these cages I see an everyday reflection of the contradiction between freedom and its definition through restriction.
Paper and Plexiglas, various sizes
Vollenbak Punk (2026)
Av collection of stories about punk (&) feminism.
The work starts from the hypothesis that the punk mentality can be used to make art more accessible, by showing that punk is about resistance, community, acceptance and identity. Punk is love, punk is beautiful!
The clothes are made for and with five flinta artists. I translated their works into a different medium and photographed them wearing their own stories.
Vollenbakpunk.com is an open platform, created to make art and (feminist, inclusive) punk more accessible - together.
Punk is not dead, it’s more alive than ever!
Installation, clothes and zine collection
Summer nights and open fire (2026)
In a world that moves ever faster, I seek ways to pause and attend to small, often unnoticed moments, creating a space for contemplation. A longing for slowness forms the driving force behind my artistic explorations. Summer nights and open fires is a publication in which I combine written micronarratives with images gathered during these journeys. I write about situations that crossed my path — experiences recalled from my youth or from travels made in recent years. Several of the photographs have been overpainted, allowing me to transform the images from figuration into abstraction.
Publication
wardderuddere.com
IG: @ward.deruddere
wardderuddere.wdr@gmail.com
Nearing Puppet State (2026)
A film and long-nosed audience stemming from thoughts on cynical disbelief.
Plastic, clay, Television
Hồi Xuân / Returning to Spring (2025 - 2026)
Last year, I initiated an Open-Call to build ar kiều bỉ, a community archive focused on preserving Vietnamese histories in Belgium. After a year of working collectively with its members, we are now sharing documentation and artworks birthed in the process. Through photography reenactments, interviews, mapping and conversations, the project explores how archiving means not only preserving but also creating spaces for transmission and community building.
In a context where Vietnamese culture is rarely made visible by institutions and is often framed through lenses of war and violence, we engage with our histories while resisting colonial narratives of archiving through collecting, activating and creating archives that look and feel like us.
Multi-Media Installation
The Silver Chord (2026)
How can we give shape to the invisible where the visible ends?
In conversations with someone who shares my name, we follow fragments from dreams, symbols and look at places you would normally pass by. We ask questions that do not expect a fixed answer. Along the way, animation lends a soul to dead matter, an attempt to make stillness breathe. We crawl into a world that feels intimate and absurd, between loss and imagination.
The Silver Chord follows the loose logic of dreams. An alternative way of dealing with death, and of giving shape and space to interpretations that are not obvious to everyone.
Video-projection, Variable dimensions
Fool's Spring (2025 - 2026)
i dreamt of two piglets
dressed in schoolboy uniforms,
they hide under the bridge over the creek
with apples in their pockets,
playing "straw-stick-brick"
(like "rock-paper-scissors")
one bites an apple and inside is sitting a cockroach
"eeeeeeeew" they drop the sticks and the bricks
in the creek,
they spit on the water
"where did you get this apple?"
"i stole it" - he lied,
"ha i am going to tell on you"
"damn cockroach”
they throw apples at one another, one hits another one's head,
the first death in the whole bible
is Abel's death.
scenography, installation
Mélancolère (2026)
In my artistic practice, I explore how relational dynamics can be expressed through photography, text and film. These media offer a way to rekindle the bonds between myself and others. For my film Mélancolère, I worked with personal memories which I handed out to passers-by in public space; they provide a foothold in what was once broken and create space for new connections.
Video-Projection, 10"
One Without (2026)
'Emerging from personal grief, this work reflects on grief as a condition tied to absence, time, and the impossibility of return. Here, I approach photography and video as both acts of remembrance and demonstrations of their own failure. The work emerged from an obsessive return to family albums, phone galleries, and forgotten archives, driven by a fear of forgetting. Searching through these snapshots of my past became a Sisyphean labor: trying to hold on to fragments of people, moments, and sensations that were already slipping away. The longer I looked, the more the images revealed not presence, but absence itself.
Video installation, large format baryte prints
Look Mean, but Deep Down, Don’t Be Mean (2026)
This installation brings together sound, image, text, and textile as traces of a performative process. Stories About the Boys (audio) and the video documentation of Procissão Sonora (video, Brussels, Belgium, March 2026) are presented alongside an 11-meter spray-painted textile developed from the same performance. The prints and photo book Look Mean, but Deep Down, Don’t Be Mean engage intimacy through family images. This installation reflects on identity as constructed through opposites: public/private, bitterness/tenderness, fiction/lived experience, where the self is both lived and performed.
Installation (audio, video, prints, book, spray-painted textile)
valeriamartins.com.pt
IG: @__valeriamartins
valeriamacedomartins@gmail.com
Memories as my Soil (2026)
Memories as my soil is an ongoing project in which I return to fragments of childhood through photography and text. By revisiting places, gestures, and objects, I explore how memory settles, shifts, and takes root over time. For me, this work is a way of holding control, choosing what I carry from my childhood rather than what is handed to me by others. The work moves between presence and absence, tracing what remains and what is lost and embracing the duality of memory as both grounding and unstable as identity grows from these incomplete traces.
publication, photographic prints
La Quizième Tour (2026)
In La Quinzème Tour I share a story of my solo expedition to
a mountain with the height of 7999 m, just one metre too short
to be in the legendary 8000-meter danger zone. The work explores
the importance of photography within mountaineering as a medium
to tell a truth or to share a story. For me, my camera becomes both
a witness and a companion. Through the notes I took and the images
I gathered along the way, I share my personal story about reaching
a peak nobody claimed before.
analog prints, archival material
Fugitive Sites (2026)
This project is an exploration of relations between attention, materials, recording apparatuses, and temporal conditions. I am interested in processes of division, difference, repetition, and in how experience can be translated through them. Through acts of recording such as photography and writing, my research focuses on the continuously negotiated relationships between body, memory, working material, spatial and durational distance. I am concerned with how these relationships can be (re)positioned, observed and articulated.
glass, steel, slide projection, silver gelatin emulsion, typewritten text.
Desire Rises Unbidden (2026)
What began as a formal experiment — extracting the non-pornographic from pornography, trying to see what that residue is and what it does on its own — became an inquiry into atemporality as a mode of being: the conscious, willful refusal to allow a thing to become past tense, to grammatically complete itself, to recede into "has been." A refusal to engage with temporality on its own, linear terms, in one of the only domains where that remains a possibility — in the stasis of the recording. The pornographic film is the ideal accompaniment for this inquiry because it is, perhaps, the most aggressively temporal medium we have, designed to be consumed and forgotten. And yet these particular films — vintage, their men aging or dead — survived, and in surviving accumulated something they might’ve never had otherwise, something they were never meant to have: the weight of time resisted.
Videoprojection
Here is a place to be (2025 - 2026)
Here is a place to be began as a reflection on a room: a place of retreat where uncertainty, memory, and imagination could coexist.
Through photography, this room gradually became a state of mind.
Light, shadow, and horizon are gathered into a suspended environment where presence and absence remain in balance.
Rather than documenting a specific place, the work seeks to create a contemplative space in which the ordinary can be encountered anew, and the boundaries between inner and outer worlds become uncertain.
Photographic installation
Digital photographs and mixed media
Variable dimensions
Tender Ambivalence (2026)
Our mother said our births already reflected who we would become. I stayed in a long time and didn't want to come out. You were loud and very fast.
Rediscovering a relationship through video and photographs. A project about two sisters born 18 months apart.
The last patch would not end up on her skin (2026)
I decided, impulsively, to stop using hormonal contraception. After a difficult process with different gynecologists, I took matters into my own hands. For the first time in ten years, I was free from externally administered hormones. No daily pills, no weekly patches. Just a natural cycle. This work explores the impact of hormones on our bodies and mental health, while reflecting on the lack of research on women’s bodies and the shortcomings of the medical world.
Video-Projection
Nine Lives (2025 - 2026)
My cat is silly. She runs around the house chasing my feet. She watches by-passers on her little window seat in her spare time. She loves to play with the fish in my fishtank, loves to watch ‘cat tv’, but most of all she loves getting pets from me.
Miaow miaow is all I hear when opening the kitchen cabinet where her food is. And when I arrive home late she miaows even more abundantly, as if scolding me for not letting her know I was going to be home later than normal. She’s what I enjoy coming home too. My best friend and partner in crime. Concerned for me when I’m taking a bath, as I’m concerned for her when she’s walking on the terrace border. Now, with her, I really did wish cats had nine lives so that I could spend all the rest of mine with her by my side.
In nine lives I show my relationship with my own cat and the cats around me since they have such a lasting impact on my life. In this work I document all the cats and cat related imagery I encounter, and reflect on my connection with them.
publications, installation, video
Grasshopper (2026)
An autofictional film unfolds through the stream of a young man’s thoughts.
A story about the breaking of the bond with his brother, their silence of words, and the memories of youth reflected in the rural landscape of their hometown.
Video- projection + book
De Voddenraper in het Bos (2026)
The discovery of a pavilion in the Sonian Forest, where the archive of René Dubois is preserved, marked the starting point of my investigation. By assembling scattered fragments, I attempt to reconstruct the story of the ragpicker, guided by absence, doubt, and memory. The forest, the archive, and the collected objects provide not just one singular truth, but rather multiple narratives that hover between fiction and nonfiction.
Publication
[In]convenient [In]competence (2026)
This work stems from a frustration with the gender-specific division of domestic chores. The title is inspired by the term ‘weaponised incompetence’. This involves strategically avoiding responsibility by pretending to be incompetent at a task so that someone else helps, takes it over or stops delegating tasks. In this work, I approach household tasks typically assigned to women and their tools in a different way than was originally intended for them.
Video
