Birds, Kunstenhuis Harelbeke, Belgium, 14 September – 17 November 2025

In recent years, birds have increasingly appeared in contemporary art. Why do artists today so often return to the image of the bird? Is it a revival of our age-old fascination with their beauty, elegance, and symbolism? Or does it signal a deeper concern with our changing relationship to nature, and the alarming decline of bird populations worldwide?

Birds, the thirteenth exhibition at Het Kunstenhuis, is curated by artist Klaus Vescheure as a meditation on the bird in art. The exhibition brings together contemporary works in which the bird appears as messenger, metaphor, and mirror — a symbol of beauty, freedom, but also of fragility and loss.

Among the artists featured is Koen Vanmechelen (°1965), for whom the chicken is a lifelong muse; the most domesticated creature on earth, and at the same time a living mirror of humankind. Through his Cosmopolitan Chicken Project, Vanmechelen crossbreeds chickens from around the world, creating hybrids that embody genetic, cultural, and social diversity.

In this group exhibition featuring work by a.o. Cindy Wright, Luc Tuymans and Hans Vandekerkchove, Vanmechelen’s iconic chickens are presented in dialogue with glass — a material that, like the birds themselves, embodies both fragility and resilience, transparency and endurance. Alongside these hybrid sculptures, photographs of the Red Jungle Fowl — the ancestral bird from which all modern chickens descend — trace a line back to origins and evolution. The works unfold as reflections on diversity, hybridity, and transformation. Glass becomes both medium and metaphor, revealing the delicate balance between strength and vulnerability, nature and culture, past and future.

Ultimately, Birds is not only about looking, but about recognizing: how every wing, every egg, every body reminds us of who we are, where we come from, and to whom we are connected.

EXHIBITION FACTS

Kunstenhuis Harelbeke

Marktstraat 100

8530 Harelbeke

14 September – 17 November 2025

Opening hours:

Open on Fridays, Saturdays, Sundays, and public holidays from 2:00 p.m. to 6:00 p.m.

More info: www.kunstenhuis.be