AUSSI LOIN QU’ICI 13.11.2025—29.03.2026

The Jewish Museum of Belgium is setting up at the Art et Marges Museum with the exhibition “Aussi loin qu’ici” (As Far as Here).

For the second part of the exhibition “ Aussi loin qu’ici” (As Far As Here), the Jewish Museum of Belgium presents a unique dialogue on memory and territory.

With Fool’s Paradise, Angyvir Padilla (1987, Venezuela) composes a fragmented landscape where exile, loss, and matter intermingle. On the ground, black coal, burnt residue, welcomes ceramic forms, like bodies on the verge of collapse but still holding on. This unstable territory is traversed by a voice, that of the artist, singing a Venezuelan melody. The landscape becomes an emotional and political space, traversed by ruins, memories, and reconstructions. Between here and elsewhere, between presence and absence, Padilla invents a shifting “home,” shaped by the traces and gestures of everyday life.

For Jim Kaliski (1929–2015, Belgium), too, territory serves as a field of memory and resistance. His first series refers to his formative childhood experience, marked by the Holocaust: as a hidden Jewish child, he escaped deportation, while his father was murdered in Auschwitz. Later, at the age of over sixty, he turned to drawing as a self-taught artist, as if to reestablish a dialogue with the world. Imbued with an obsession with detail, his works seek to give form to the unspeakable and to inscribe memory in gesture. The second series, dedicated to the violence in Algeria in the 1990s, extends this memory to other geographies, making the intimate a prism through which to read the tragedies of the 20th century. In these drawings, which focus closely on people and places, Kaliski inscribes a silent solidarity between victims and reminds us that “all the bleached bodies of all genocides resemble each other and come together.

The practices of Angyvir Padilla and Jim Kaliski, formally distant, converge in their shared focus on territory as a place of memory. Elsewhere intertwines with here, traces of the past cross the present, the intimate becomes History. Memory is no longer just a testimony, but an act of resistance—a way of inhabiting the present differently. Yet one nagging question remains: how can we feel at home in a world marked by displacement and loss?

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Angyvir Padilla (1987, Venezuela) is an artist who frequently combines installation art with sculpture, performance, photography, video, and sound. She takes as her starting point domestic elements from her youth in Venezuela, which she transposes into a different environment: she seeks to recreate the impression of family intimacy in order to preserve a trace of what once existed, while opening up new narratives of personal reconciliation. The issue of migration is addressed through her own experience, but also sometimes through female figures in her family, as well as through the use of voice and material as vectors of memory. Revived in another cultural context, these personal traces question how past experiences allow us to anchor ourselves in the world.

Jim Kaliski (1929–2015, Belgium) was a self-taught artist whose life was profoundly marked by the Holocaust. Born into a Jewish family, he was forced to go into hiding to escape deportation, while his father was arrested and murdered in Auschwitz. This experience as a teenager would mark him for life, but it was not until the age of sixty that he began drawing to tell his story. With his hyperthymesia, he bears witness to the violence of his century as a way of transcending his personal experience. His thousands of drawings remind us, in his own words, that “all the bleached bodies of all genocides look alike and come together in stench and abomination.”

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VERNISSAGE

THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 13, 2025, 6:00 pm —8:30 pm

With works by Yassir Amazine, Aimé Bahati, Nour Ben Slimane, Sergio Carrasco Olave, Georges Cauchy, Sylvain Corentin, Adam Cicherski, Sylvain Cosijns, Heide De Bruyne, Germana Dragna, Sebastián Ferreira, Michael Golz, Juanma Gonzalez, Richard Greaves, Julie Hascoët, Josef Hofer, Jeroen Hollander, Jim Kaliski, Côme Lequin, Maxime Mormont, Raphaël Michel, Ludovic Mennesson, Mark Anthony Mulligan, Michaël Mvukani Mpiolani, Fernando Oreste Nannetti, Helmut Nimczewski, Angyvir Padilla, Adèle Pion, André Prues, Melina Riccio, André Robillard, Jean-Pierre Rostenne, Marie Steins, Mohammed Targa, Donatien Toma Ndani Djemelas, Koki Ueshima, Warren Van Ess, Willem Van Genk, Gérard Van Lankveld, Marc Vervloet.

In partnership with the Art et Marges Museum.