Afgebroken fluisteringen | Groepsshow

The gaze glides along, literally from image to image, until it comes to rest on the back of a bronze sculpture. It is the figure of a woman in a long pleated headscarf who, turned with her back to the camera, looks out over the immense blue-tinted glass facade of a modern office tower. We circle through Botanique, the Brussels botanical garden laid out in the nineteenth century. Emma van der Put filmed the sculptures that still inhabit the botanical garden. In her video Project Panorama, 2025, they are the protagonists who, anchored in history, observe the city’s relentless pace of development. The group of statues with their hushed drama stands in contrast to a surrounding realm of anonymous, geometrically shaped architectural giants. The park is like a time capsule, but what information is enclosed within it, and what does it tell us about ourselves, about humanity? Past, present, and future seem to hold their breath here. The work of Emma van der Put is piercingly suggestive. The human figure in all its corporeality is portrayed in Project Panorama as an autonomous presence—a body both monumental and vulnerable. From this ambiguity, the sculptures reach out toward the world. But does the body hold firm?\n\nThe body is vulnerable in our era of geopolitical tensions and unraveling social structures. In her magnificent poem Autotomie, the Polish poet Wislawa Szymborska writes: In danger, the sea cucumber divides itself in two: one self it yields to the world for devouring, while with the other it flees. (..) On one edge death, on the other life. Here despair, there good heart. (..) We too can divide ourselves, oh certainly, we too. But only into bodies and broken whispers. Into body and poetry. Szymborska’s poem speaks to the complexity of the human soul, which can withdraw and, independently of the bod