Intiem, Villa Les Zéphyrs, Westende (Middelkerke), Belgium, 15 June – 8 November 2026
- 2 dagen geleden
- 2 minuten om te lezen
Intimacy is the space where we come closest to another and where we are most exposed. Why does nearness draw us in and unsettle us at the same time? What do we surrender when we let someone in, and what do we keep behind the door?
Intiem (Intimate), the summer exhibition at Villa Les Zéphyrs, is curated by guest curator Jan Leysen as a meditation on closeness. Leysen, a criminal defence lawyer and a collector of contemporary art since the age of seventeen, drew together eighteen artists around a broad reading of intimacy: the experience of connectedness, our place in relation to others, the warmth and the unease that nearness brings. The protected 1922 holiday villa in Middelkerke, with its preserved interior by Henry van de Velde (art nouveau pioneer, forerunner of modernism and founder of the Weimar school), gives the theme its setting and its subject at once.
Among the artists is Koen Vanmechelen (°1965), for whom the chicken is a lifelong muse; the most domesticated animal on earth and at the same time a living mirror of humankind. In his Cosmopolitan Chicken Project, Vanmechelen crossbreeds chicken breeds from across the world into hybrids that carry genetic, cultural and social diversity.
At Les Zéphyrs he shifts his attention from the tamed animal to one that resists taming. Domestication presents a mounted toucan at the opening of a hollowed tree trunk, bound with rope and tilted on a wooden plinth. The cavity in which the bird nests in the wild has been cut from the forest, tied shut and put on display. Where the exhibition asks after nearness and warmth, the work names its price: to keep the wild close is to bind it, prepare it, set it on a plinth. Intimacy carried to its limit becomes possession. The Flemish psychologist and psychoanalyst Paul Verhaeghe calls the body our most intimate stranger, something we have tamed for centuries. What he situates within the body, Vanmechelen enacts on a wild animal.
Inside a house that is itself tamed space, the bound bird turns the question back on the visitor: how much of what we call nearness is also a form of holding on.
EXHIBITION FACTS
Villa Les Zéphyrs
Henri Jasparlaan 173, 8434 Westende (Middelkerke)
15 June – 8 November 2026
Opening hours: Free during the opening hours of the Tourist Information Point.
Guided tour every Tuesday morning from 10 to 12 a.m. during the summer and autumn holidays.