Oluwatobiloba Ajayi walks through Magical Realism: Imagining Natural Dis/order, WIELS’s current exhibition that looks to the porous space between magic and reality to open up alternative responses to our precarious relationship with Earth.
The building that is now home to WIELS used to be a brewery, so it is fitting that its current exhibition feels like an unfolding fermentation. Magical Realism: Imagining Natural Dis/order sees its twenty-seven artists prompt, brew, and instigate across three floors, a roof, a stairway, and further uptown in argos centre for audiovisual arts. The source of all this activity lies in the exhibition’s title, which reads like a prompt; in a time defined by more salient ecological extremities and earthly despondency, how can artists help generate a fertile lens through which we might remedy our relationship with our environments, and perhaps even the planet? If the task feels large, it is. Yet the exhibition fosters a rhizomatic environment: from Elizabeth A. Povinelli’s archaeological fabulations on life after the extractive logic of capitalism has consumed itself, to Marisa Merz’s compulsive handlings of the scraps of domestic life, to Anne Marie Maes’s interspecies collaborations, Magical Realism skilfully cradles the magnitude and the frictions of its artists’ responses.
Entering the exhibition, I was first met with a sea of floating, translucent apparitions by Suzanne Jackson. Shredded paper, yellow-stained curtain lace, fruit produce netting, and tea towels are frozen in place, given a structural body by transparent acrylic paint. These sculptures, which Jackson refers to as “environmental abstractions,” are hung on chicken wire so they appear caught and suspended in the air — spectres of past lives and cycles of disuse. In these sculptures, Jackson takes her featherly, watercolour-like acrylics — for which she is most known — off the wall, metabolising her found materials into compositions illustrative of the unbridled chaos and primordial harmonies of natural ecosystems.
Magical Realism draws not particularly from its eponymous literary tradition — the fiction genre in which fantastical elements are presented as seemingly realistic — but on the fictive tension between the two words. Magic: its supernatural inventiveness, its existence beyond the logic of rationality, and Realism: an attempt to deal with the facts of things, with what is observable. Jackson’s work, and many others in the show, unpack that term, then blow it wide open. The sculptures are both scientific, reliant on the material properties of her fragments, and otherworldly, as she uncannily severs the materials from their “natural” contexts. Jackson makes magic from the reality of her substantive life, encroaching on our space as viewers and forcing us to reckon with our excessive outputs.
Opposite Jackson’s abstractions is Otobong Nkanga’s imagined post-apocalyptic landscape, cutting through the gallery space. An ashened, aslant tree reaches out from a bed of scorched sand, its colour graduated from black to rust. The scene is mostly barren, but a series of glass spheres dotted around the tree act as terrariums, preserving ecosystems of their own and suggesting there is still life to come. The work seethes against Jackson’s acrylic bodies, warning of the figures that might haunt our current age if we don’t act quickly and appropriately.
Throughout the exhibition, I am reminded of Rob Nixon’s concept of slow violence: a violence that spreads across time and space, often imperceptible and delayed over multiple generations. Environmental damage is one such violence. Its attritional malignance is unspectacular and often not sensational; therefore, any moves towards climate justice require alternative modes of communication to impel collective action. This, to me, feels like what most artists are responding to: the need to create radical narratives from which a more life-sustaining world might emerge.
In a series of black-and-white photographs by Barbara and Michael Leisgen, Barbara’s figure is set into the rural landscape of eastern Belgium. Her arms are outstretched so that the sinews of her limbs double the boundaries between parcels of land. Minia Biabiany parallels the landscape more subtly; her pencil drawings of plants on tracing and banana leaf paper are studded across the walls on the exhibition’s first floor, their placement echoing the hushed reverential tone of their scale and linework. Biabiany commemorates the medicinal plants of her native Guadeloupe through close observation and depiction. If much of our environmental consciousness is inherited, these artists take on the task of reshaping a more equitable relationship with the world around us, recognising that we are not distinct from it.
Our idea of linear progress is part and parcel of our current environmental crisis. It is the modern notion that things continually get better, that our extant moment has developed from the positive procedure of an earlier one that has contributed to our climate emergency and general inability to act right about it. Nixon’s concept of slow violence begins to rethink our scales of time and consequence, and the artists in Magical Realism bend our grip of time further still. Ann Veronica Janssens takes a techno-optimist approach, using new-age technologies like aerogel and structural colouring to create intangible futuristic works that undermine the assumed authority of human perception. Other artists venture further off into the future to begin to historicise the climate catastrophe. Elizabeth A. Povinelli’s work fabulates a museum that holds the archives of a fictitious ancient civilisation that survived the inward collapse of Earth. The Museum of Tardigrade Prehistory asks: ‘What happens when our cycles of extraction and accumulation loop back in on themselves?’ The work is at once futuristic, protohistoric, and speculative — floating dizzyingly above and around our understanding of time. These variegated atemporal approaches act as counter-forces, pushing the total reaction of Magical Realism towards its pressure point.
This reaction finds its figurative release in the work of Anne Marie Maes, for whom living bacteria, insects, and algae are co-conspirators. In Intelligent Guerilla Beehive (Heart), a skeletal glasshouse structure is draped with multiple, overlapping skins made of microbes, each a different thickness and lucidity, so that light seeps through in varying intensities. At moments, the artist’s hand is reintroduced to an otherwise bacterial composition as the skins are stitched together, punctured, and frayed. Maes refutes the idea that humans are in any way distinct from our larger ecosystems. On first glance, Maes’s skins reminded me of the scoby produced in every batch of my ex’s kombucha. He described the scoby as a living thing, a culture of bacteria and yeast needed to get the fermentation going. In a transparent plinth in the gallery, the artist has put its work on show. Combining black tea, sugar, and a pre-existing scoby, she is brewing kombucha in the gallery. These microbial processes from which she makes work are directly analogous to those occurring in every living organism, and Maes’s work invites a chorus of species to sing alongside one another; here, the analogy of fermentation is made literal. I’m reminded of our casual and constant reliance on thriving microbiomes, of the colonies of microorganisms that live in the mouth, eyes, nose, vagina, and on our skin.
On my way out of the exhibition, I decided to take the long journey from the roof by the stairs when, on the second landing, I encountered a siren song. The staircase in the WIELS’s Blomme building wraps alongside what was once a silo. In this desolate void of a space, historically used for storing the grains needed to make beer — wheat, barley, maybe corn — Jota Mombaça presents a song, Running Towards an Assembly of Things. The sounds emanating from the emptied silo initially struck me as horrific. Developed during a residency in Mexico City for TONO festival for time-based art, Mombaça’s piece blends recordings of bodies of water and human-made sounds: unidentifiable clicking, partial voices in a cloud of distortion, waves of garbled tongues, and rumbles that are more felt in the body than heard. Pouring out from the cavity, the sounds swallow you whole and suck you back in towards the silo’s conical abyss.
This full-body immersion in the inextricable expression of people and planet alludes to the worlds we have yet to build, but must. Worlds that hold both humanity and the environment not as separable entities but as collective forces with tethered destinies. The final piece in Magical Realism reverberates at a planetary frequency, giving voice to the fragility of the precipice we find ourselves on the edge of. Its fright of sounds serves as an audible expression of the stakes at hand in the climate conversation. Yet the piece — and the exhibition as a whole — does not purport to offer any solutions; rather, it brings the issue to a boil. It is an ending that stays with you, sticking to every step and fizzing on the tongue as we do the difficult work of worldmaking, every day, in the turbulence of the one before.
Written by Oluwatobiloba Ajayi
Magical Realism: Imagining Natural Dis/order continues at WIELS, Brussels, through September 28th, 2025.
