by Chris Erik Thomas // June 24, 2025
This article is part of our feature topic Legality.
On a small, princess-pink television on the fifth floor of the WIELS Contemporary Art Centre in Brussels, an animated bear smokes a blunt as a spectral voice recounts a run-in with the police that nearly devolved into violence. The film is Nigerian-American poet Precious Okoyomon’s ‘It’s dissociating season’ (2019), and the narrator is her brother. Rendered on a Disney-branded TV, and shown thousands of miles from the U.S., Okoyomon’s defanging of America’s racist, state-sanctioned carceral system is darkly funny, and deeply surreal. Though that may be, in part, thanks to the hazy glow of pink-tinted windows framing the small room that Okoyomon’s work occupies.
‘Magical Realism: Imagining Natural Dis/order,’ installation view at WIELS, 2025 // Photo by Eline Willaert
The incisive video is just one of many to be found in WIELS’ sweeping new exhibition, ‘Magical Realism: Imagining Natural Dis/order,’ spread across the full breadth of the arts center (and spilling over to argos centre for audiovisual arts across town). Curated by the trio of Sofia Dati, Helena Kritis and Dirk Snauwaert, the show is the third in a series of ambitious exhibitions at WIELS, centered on “the necessity for transformation,” following 2017’s ‘The Absent Museum’ and 2020’s ‘Risquons-tout.’
‘Magical Realism: Imagining Natural Dis/order,’ installation view at WIELS, 2025 // Photo by Eline Willaert
There’s no fantasy to be found here; the works, like those of the artistic and literary genre the exhibition borrows its title from, are rooted in reality. In keeping one foot in the “real” while stepping into the mystical, the show lives up to its tagline: imagining new systems of natural dis/order, be they social, political, or physical. In practice, ‘Magical Realism’ most often targets the ecological, presenting works that interrogate our relationship with the ailing planet. The framing is timely, given that the world feels locked in a losing battle between the laws of nature and those of humanity. Mercifully, ‘Magical Realism’ manages to sidestep the kinds of apocalyptic framing or overt political tropes flooding the art world. In the show’s accompanying exhibition catalog, Italian philosopher Federico Campagna argues that “each world is fundamentally a fiction, and thus the process of world-building is a form of myth-making.”
By embracing the creation of myth as a means of breaking down the constraints of the domineering fiction of reality, the over 30 international artists in the show are free to use art as a tool to challenge, subvert and shatter. They unearth the deeply rooted, extractive systems that fail to protect, replacing them with magic as a means of resistance.
‘Magical Realism: Imagining Natural Dis/order,’ installation view at WIELS, 2025 // Photo by Eline Willaert
One of the most literal examples of these themes can be found on the first floor, with Nigerian artist Otobong Nkanga’s tableau of regeneration. On a stretch of soil with volcanic hues of charcoal grey and rusty brown, a burnt tree reaches up toward the sky, while a handful of self-sustaining terrariums rest on the ground. Here lies new life, ensconced in blown glass bubbles. Affixed to a nearby wall, Nkanga’s ‘Until Then’ (2023) offers a brief poem etched into a concrete slab: “While we stand, while we wait, while we watch, we can’t yet mourn …until then.” It’s a message as concise as it is timely, given today’s ecological collapse and political turmoil. “How can we find that space to mourn what has been lost, and to actually nurture and take care of these ecosystems that keep resisting,” Dati asks us during a discussion of Nkanga’s work.
‘Magical Realism: Imagining Natural Dis/order,’ installation view at WIELS, 2025 // Photo by Eline Willaert
The answer is, simply, to make space. ‘Magical Realism’ gives each artist room to breathe, offering site-specific transformations that bring a sense of wildness to the show; each section offers a fresh take on the many unlawful, hegemonic systems ailing modern society. “It was helpful to go toward [artistic] practices that also valorize or uphold the powers of imagination,” Dati told us. French artist Suzanne Husky crafts hubs for non-human life through a series of embroidered felt works, exploring regenerative world-building, while Argentinian artist Adrián Villar Rojas uses a custom computational framework called “Time Engine” to simulate the impact of socio-political systems on imagined ecosystems, then transplants the AI-infused digital world into physical form through the towering symbiotic sculpture, ‘The End of Imagination II’ (2022).
Adrián Villar Rojas: ‘The End of Imagination,’ 2022, location: live environmental simulation generated by Time Engine software // © Courtesy of the artist
Artificial Intelligence systems become a tool of exploration elsewhere in the show, as French artist Gaëlle Choisne presents ‘Safe space for passing history_What is love?’ (2025) on six massive plywood panels. The looming collage work assembles cultural iconography, talismanic script, stones, shells and, crucially, portraiture derived from an open-source AI tool called This Person Does Not Exist, which generates fake faces based on millions of real people. By painting these amalgamations of humanity, Choisne gives life to the “soulless” renderings of people created through the meat grinder of anonymity, crafting mythical portals of existence as an ode to the real Black bodies that have their identities stripped away.
‘Magical Realism: Imagining Natural Dis/order,’ installation view at WIELS, 2025 // Photo by Eline Willaert
Around a corner, Indonesian artist Ade Darmawan presents ‘Tuban’ (2019-ongoing), an olfactory mise-en-scène featuring essential oils made from Indonesian herbs bubbling in test tubes and beakers set atop teak Modernist furniture with deep ties to the country’s colonialist past. The work offers a salve for postcolonial trauma: the oil drips onto autobiographies of the former Indonesian president, Suharto, metaphorically “rewriting” history as it distills layers of state violence into ghostly scents, subjugating these imperialist legacies to vapor.
The rule of law is, essentially, a work of fiction, upheld by the powerful. The issue, as Dati sees it, is that “once you’re in that fiction, it’s difficult to shift to a completely different paradigm that would invite you into another [reality].” By making space for alternative frameworks to flourish, the works in ‘Magical Realism’ don’t just critique the failures of our oppressive legal frameworks; they render them obsolete.
Exhibition Info
WIELS
Group Show: ‘Magical Realism: Imagining Natural Dis/Order’
Exhibition: May 29-Sept. 28, 2025
wiels.org
Av. Van Volxem 354, 1190 Forest, Belgium, click here for map
