Exhibition

Setting The Table

Tue 23 Sep — Fri 24 Oct 2025

Price

Free

Opening hours

Thursday - Saturday: 14:00 - 18:00 .
On Thursdays with a concert in the Pilar Box: 19:30 - 21:00

Location

Pilar Expo (First & Second Floor)
Triomflaan, Entrance 6

No tickets needed

Facebook Event

𝘚𝘦𝘵𝘵𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘛𝘢𝘣𝘭𝘦 is an exhibition and a series of public events activated by Lou Cocody-Valentino, Pushing Hands, Tashattot and Shif–t*. Co-curated by Sjoerd Beijers, Natalija Gucheva and Abel Hartooni, the programme is hosted by Pilar from 23 September – 24 October.

The project explores the table and its non-Western counterpart, 𝘚𝘶𝘧𝘳𝘢, as spaces where food and stories are shared and where collective meaning is shaped. Here, the table functions as a curatorial framework: defining who gathers, how encounters take place, and what connections emerge. It becomes a tool for rethinking access and participation.

By inviting collectives, artists and communities who might never otherwise meet, to come together to inhabit and activate the exhibition space. The project opens up to horizontal forms of gatherings and exchanges. Through dinners, installations, performances and participatory workshops, the programme aims to initiate new encounters. In doing so, it challenges institutional norms, reframing art spaces as sites of negotiation, dialogue, and hospitality rather than exclusion or passive spectatorship.

Meet the curators

Natalija Gucheva

Natalija Gucheva is a multimedia artist and independent curator with a focus on the synergy between art and social processes. Her creative process involves crafting immersive and speculative environments that explore the intersections of embodiment, memory, and collective healing. Working across performance, sculpture, video, and installation, Gucheva weaves feminist and queer perspectives into collaborative spaces that challenge dominant narratives. She also curates and facilitates gatherings that emphasise collective knowledge production and nurture alternative ways of thinking. She is a full time member of Ghent-based collective Shif—t*.

Abel Hartooni

Abel Hartooni is a visual artist, sound maker, and curator based in Brussels. His work revolves around a hybrid practice that seeks to extend the language of painting and merge it with sculpture, sound, video and writing. His work has been presented at Noman’s Gallery in Amsterdam, Montoro 12 in Brussels, Soo Contemporary and O gallery in Tehran, Motorkhane in Shiraz, Trefpunt in Ghent, and Vleeshal in Middelburg. He has co-curated exhibitions such as, “DrieDee: Hatching from Scratch” at Kunsthal Mechelen in 2024, “Eye Becomes Water” at Het Paviljoen in 2025, and “For Sometime I’ve been Standing” at Kunsthal Gent in 2025.

Sjoerd Beijers

Sjoerd’s practice moves between institutions and self-organised contexts, focusing on how knowledge is shared and who participates. At Bonnefanten, they coordinate YOUNG OFFICE, supporting emerging cultural makers through horizontal, peer-led methods. As chair of B32, they initiated Anti-Class, a participant-led summer school and residency conceived as a “carrier bag” of stories and perspectives, with no fixed outcome. Their work explores pedagogical formats that resist extractive logics, seeking environments that invite unlearning, foster mutual support, and open new ways of being together. Through neighbourhood lunches, public activations and unexpected encounters in playgrounds or parking lots, Sjoerd nurtures fragile ecologies of exchange where learning is collective, relational and caring.

Participating collectives & artists

Pushing Hands Collective

Pushing Hands Collective 推手屯 is a multi-disciplinary team of five—Ching Shu, Johanne, Many, Zepph, and Di—working across performance, visual arts, sound, and anthropology. As part of Brussels-based St1ckyr1ce, the collective supports Asian-specific projects, research, and community building. Inspired by the martial arts practice of “pushing hands,” they use it as a metaphor and compass, integrating workshops, communal tool-making, cooking, mapping, and dance music. Through their Pushing Hands Gatherings, they explore care, identity, migration, and belonging for Asian communities, while occasionally welcoming allies. Their transnational roots span Taiwan, China, Singapore, Switzerland, France, and Belgium, reflecting histories and identities in between cultures.

Lou Cocody-Valentino

Lou Cocody-Valentino is a multidisciplinary artist working with screenprinting, painting, textile compositions, and installations. She graduated in 2021 with a Master’s in Printmaking from La Cambre, Belgium. Her practice draws on memories of growing up as an islander in Martinique and the experience of being multicultural, exploring the fragmentation of self. Moving from classical etching to experimental work with recycled materials, including melted plastics, printed fabrics, painted wood, and woven yarns, Lou creates intimate relationships with her materials. Her works form a poetic archipelago, harmonizing diverse techniques to explore personal geography and the influence of territory and landscape on identity.

Tashattot

Tashattot, Arabic for “dispersion,” is a Belgium-based art collective founded by Lebanese artists Charbel Khoury, Gaëlle Khalifeh, and Rami Moukarzel. The collective supports visual artists, musicians, filmmakers, and cultural practitioners originally from the SWANA region and currently dispersed across Europe. Tashattot creates opportunities for collaborations, commissions, and funding for these expatriate artists. Its name reflects both the literal scattering of its members far from their homelands and the metaphorical dispersion of ideas and ways of thinking, as in the Arabic phrase tashattot al afkar (“scattered thoughts”). Tashattot is a work in progress, evolving through practice, open discussions, and feedback, continually building strategies to respond to the needs and aspirations of SWANA expat artists.

Shif-t*

Shif-t* is a transdisciplinary collective of artists consisted of beaudine dermine, Fien Verhaert, George Chinnery, Lyra Oey, Marthe Huyse, Natalija Gucheva, Romy Straetmans and Manon Klein which is rooted in transformation, kinship, and fluid world-making. Inspired by Ursula K. Le Guin’s concept of Shif, the group embraces change as integral to identity, creativity, and community. Their practice centers on polyphony, weaving diverse voices into layered, inclusive narratives through art, craft, and cultural histories. Based at De Verffabriek, Shift* cultivates spaces of care, experimentation, and collaboration, imagining queer, open-ended futures where art is communal, identity is fluid, and creativity nurtures self-sustaining networks across disciplines and borders.