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Very Contemporary

The network of contemporary art venues in the Meuse-Rhine Euregion

16/06/2026

OPENING ↝Jester
Joy Ride: Alessandro Cugola in dialogue with the Jester archive
*Opening 20.06.26, 16h*

Jester presents Joy Ride by Alessandro Cugola from June 20th to August 23rd. Developed at Jester, in dialogue with the institution’s archive, the exhibition reactivates fifty years of artistic production. Through site-specific installations and a durational performance, Cugola triggers a chain reaction in which the archive is moved, exposed, contaminated, conserved and eventually packed away again. The archive enters a temporary traffic system, a joy ride.

With this exhibition, Jester celebrates its fifth anniversary, alongside the fortieth anniversary of FLACC and fiftieth anniversary of CIAP, the organizations that came together to form Jester.

On June 20th, Jester also launches its summer programme, as part of the site-wide opening day together with C-mine and LUCA School of Arts. During this evening, Jester opens its studios to the public, and inaugurates and activates new (semi-)permanent works in the public space.

12/06/2026

JUST OPENED ↝Art au Centre Liège
Art au Centre “Rawette”: Ida Ferrand & Joëlle Jakubiak
*⟶ 31.08.26*

Art au Centre is proud to announce the upcoming cross-border collaboration between the non-profit organisation Mouvements Sans Titre (Liège) and Les Ateliers Fructôse (Dunkirk).

This partnership brings together two complementary areas of expertise: the organisation of an art trail in public spaces and the management of shared studios for visual artists.

For this first event, discover the works of artists Ida Ferrand and Joëlle Jakubiak. Two artists, two shop windows.

10/06/2026

NEW EXHIBITION ↝SCHUNCK
Charlotte Koenen: Afterimage
*16.06 ⟶ 25.10.26*

Charlotte Koenen presents a large-scale installation in the Atrium, developed from her research into nineteenth-century lavoirs: historic washhouses in the French countryside. Once vibrant, collective workspaces, these sites now remain mainly as traces of use in worn floors and basins.

The installation, titled Afterimage, refers to the visual impression that remains on the retina after the original image has disappeared. Like the lavoirs themselves: places that have lost their function but continue to linger as echoes in the landscape.

Charlotte Koenen (1992) lives and works in Maastricht. She grew up in Belgium and France. In 2014, she graduated from the Maastricht Academy of Fine Arts and Design. From 2015 to 2016, she was a participant at the Jan van Eyck Academie. In 2022, she received the O-68 Award, a prize from Art Gallery O-68 supporting artists at a key stage in their careers.
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📸 Charlotte Koenen, detail of photographs exposed on light-sensitive gelatine, 2026

04/06/2026

OPENING ↝Leopold-Hoesch-Museum & Papiermuseum Düren
Adrián Balseca. A Chiasmatic Body
*Friday 12.06.26, 19h*

To mark his first institutional solo exhibition in Germany, the Ecuadorian artist Adrián Balseca presents a large-scale installation in which two of his key bodies of work and research cycles come together for the first time in a site-specific presentation.

Linked by personal and collective narratives, the two works, “Elogio a la Oscuridad” [Ode to Darkness] (2011–2024) and “The Skin of Labour” (2016) explore the relationships between body and landscape, as well as between health and territory. The installation opens up a multi-layered dialogue on the interconnections between the exploitation of raw materials, industrial modernity and imaging technologies as key instruments of Western power.

01/06/2026

Looking for cultural activities? Here's a selection of special events for the month!
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Leopold-Hoesch-Museum & Papiermuseum Düren SCHUNCK Het Nieuwe Domein Ludwig Forum für Internationale Kunst Jester IKOB - Museum für Zeitgenössische Kunst Greylight Projects

28/05/2026

NEW EXHIBITION ↝SCHUNCK
Staircase
*01.06.26 ⟶ 23.12.26*

In the staircase of SCHUNCK, photographer and visual artist Romy Finke presents new work, alongside presentations by Karin Peulen, Nieke Lemmens, Nonzuzo Gxekwa, Francy, and en f (Romy, Francy en Petra Finke).
As an artist, she develops a visually and conceptually refined practice at the intersection of photography and visual art. Finke is affiliated with the Jan van Eyck Academy and has previously been active in Heerlen through, among others, Kunstencentrum Signe (kuS).

The commission aligns with Finke’s community-curatorial approach. In addition to creating new work for the Glaspaleis, she invites artists who are close to her both personally and professionally into the staircase: Karin Peulen, Nieke Lemmens, Nonzuzo Gxekwa, and her two sisters, Francy and Petra, with whom Finke forms f.
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📸 Romy Finke, Untitled, 2022, inkjet print on archival matt paper, screen print, carbon, 110 x 155 cm

26/05/2026

JUST OPENED ↝Z33 House for Contemporary Art, Design and Architecture
gabi dao: The horrors persist but so do I
*⟶ 12.07.26*

gabi dao’s moving image practice blends and bends genres and media such as experimental cinema, horror, sci-fi and puppetry. These videos are often situated within installations that further their cinematic worlds, which can include carefully crafted ceramics, textile sculptures and bespoke scents. dao’s works explore the fear and fantasy of inter-species mingling, finding sympathetic alliances with animals such as mosquitos or bats, drawing parallels between narratives that demonize them alongside racialized, q***r and trans communities.

gabi dao is from the unceded and ancestral territories of the xʷməθkwəy̓əm, Skwxwú7mesh and Səl̓ílwətaʔ/Selilwitulh Nations (‘Vancouver’, Canada) who is currently based in the Netherlands. For their upcoming solo exhibition at Z33, dao will be presenting a new installation and short film co-directed and co-written with Lou Lou Sainsbury, both works developed whilst in residence at the Jan Van Eyck Academie in Maastricht.
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In collaboration with: Jan van Eyck Academy, Maastricht
Curator: Kevin Gallagher

21/05/2026

OPENING ↝Ludwig Forum für Internationale Kunst
Christina Kubisch. The Emergence of Sound
*Opening Sat. 23.05.26, 18h*

With The Emergence of Sound, Ludwig Forum Aachen presents a wide-ranging survey of the sound artist and composer Christina Kubisch (b. 1948 in Bremen, lives and works in Berlin). For more than five decades, Kubisch has been traversing the boundaries of composition, installation, performance and even intermedia video environments. In her artistic research, sound and noise are not mere by-products of physical processes, nor are they a purely musical language. Rather, they are cultural and natural forces that she sets to work in her interrogations of wide-ranging constellations, cutting across aesthetic, spatial, technical, scientific, infrastructural and social domains.
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Curated by Miriam Schmidt.
📸 © Christina Kubisch

19/05/2026

LECTURE ↝Het Nieuwe Domein
On the forgotten world of clay pipe
* Saturday 13.05.26, 14h*

For many, the clay pipe conjures up only a vague image: a nostalgic toy bubble-blowing pipe from the 1950s, or the distinguished gentlemen on old to***co packets with their long Gouda pipes. But behind that small, everyday object lies a history that helped shape daily life in the Netherlands and Limburg for no less than three centuries.

During this special lecture, you will discover how the clay pipe was once produced tens of millions of times a year, why this everyday object has remained so overlooked in our historical accounts, and what surprising role it played in both Limburgs. You will also hear why archaeologists continue to find piles of pipe bowls and stem fragments to this day, and what these actually tell us.
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This lecture is organised by the Sittard Archaeology Working Group, in collaboration with the museum.

14/05/2026

OPENING ↝Ludwig Forum für Internationale Kunst
Marianne Halter & Mario Marchisella: Centaur – Human and Horse
*Opening Sunday 17.05.26, 11h + artist talk at 15h*

Coinciding with this summer’s World Equestrian Games in Aachen, the Ludwig Forum presents a film installation as a thematic counterpart to the event. Taking its title from the Centaur – the part-horse, part-human hybrid creature of Greek mythology – the installation brings together two short films, projected at scale in the museum’s central hall. Each offers a strikingly different take on the relationship between human and horse.

The installation takes its name from Centaur (2020), a film by German-Iranian artist and filmmaker Yalda Afsah (b. 1983), whose work probes the complex dynamics between humans and animals. Poised between care and control, between affinity and manipulation, the film offers extensive documentary insights into the microcosm of dressage. An intimate observer of the interplay between human and horse, Afsah turns her lens on dressage – a form of domestication not without controversy – and raises uncomfortable questions: who has control over who? Who steers, who follows?
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Curated by Esther Boehle.
📸 1. Yalda Afsah, Centaur, 2020, film still
2. Marianne Halter, Mario Marchisella, Pferde über Wiese [Horses Across Meadowlands], 2014, film still.

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