Museum Dhondt-Dhaenens presents a major solo exhibition by Edith Dekyndt
From 1 February to 17 May 2026, the Museum Dhondt-Dhaenens in Sint-Martens-Latem presents a major solo exhibition by Belgian artist Edith Dekyndt, whose practice unfolds across video, sculpture, installation, drawing, and sound.
Titled It could be James on the beach. It could be. It could be very fresh and clear., the exhibition takes its inspiration from a historic encounter between James Ensor and Albert Einstein on the Belgian coast. This marks Edith Dekyndt’s first major institutional exhibition in Belgium since 2016.
A meeting between James Ensor and Albert Einstein on the Belgian coast serves as the starting point for this solo exhibition by Edith Dekyndt, curated by Martin Germann. Only a few fragile photographs remain from that encounter—images that would later inspire Robert Wilson and Philip Glass in their opera Einstein on the Beach.
At the center of the exhibition is Ensor’s Still Life with Chinoiseries, from MDD’s own collection. This work depicts imported objects—fabrics, ceramics, decorative elements—and embodies a Western perspective on distant lands.
Around Ensor’s work, Dekyndt —whose practice pays particular attention to materials and their transient nature— assembles a series of objects: veils marked by traces of torn wallpaper, textiles, Chinese and Japanese ceramics, and various marine creatures. These elements refer, among other things, to mathematics, the passage of time, and the atomic disaster in Hiroshima. A central piece in the exhibition is a locally woven curtain, inspired by Japanese kimono patterns that, at the moment of the atomic explosion, were burned into the skin of Hiroshima’s victims. The textile, both soft and charred, evokes the moment when the atomic bomb reduced everything to ash.
Between Ensor and Einstein lies a subtle transition—from an old world shaped by colonial perspectives to a modern world in which science can bring about devastating destruction. Dekyndt’s exhibition makes this transition tangible, not through a concrete narrative, but through the presence of objects, the slowness of materials, and the silence they leave within us.
Practical information
Edith Dekyndt
It could be James on the beach. It could be. It could be very fresh and clear.
Curator: Martin Germann
1 February – 17 May 2026
Press preview: Thursday, 29 January at 2PM
Museum Dhondt-Dhaenens, Museumlaan 14, 9831 Deurle
About Edith Dekyndt
Born in 1960 in Ypres, Belgium, Edith Dekyndt lives and works in Brussels and Berlin.
Edith Dekyndt is an artist whose works offer sensory experiences grounded in the close observation of materials and the cultural contexts that surround them. After studying communication, Dekyndt enrolled at the École des Beaux-Arts in Mons. Process-oriented and conceptual in nature, her practice focuses on objects—often ordinary—that make up everyday life, and on their transformation through contact with natural and architectural environments. Her installations and performances incorporate natural and manufactured objects, photography, video, sound and light, the latter occupying a central place in her work. Each of her projects is rooted in the observation of minute details through which seemingly mundane objects and situations become at once sublime and deeply affecting. They invite the viewer to become aware of the fragile balance of chemical and physical phenomena, as well as the transitory and fluid nature of the material world.
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