Playground 2026

Evelien Cammaert

Trees and Memories

Performance

Evelien Cammaert invites a small group of visitors to gather around a low table. Using the photographs we carry on our smartphones, the artist explores how memories are formed, shift and acquire new meaning. Old images are transformed into new aesthetic experiences that can be shared with others. In this intimate performance, the image archive is not a static repository, but a fertile point of departure from which reflection, transformation and renewal arise.

Please bring your fully charged smartphone to this performance. 

Marijke De Roover

Live, Laugh, Limerence

Video

Marijke De Roover’s practice unpicks and critiques social hierarchies, including gender, class, sexual orientation and institutional power. In her video work, inspired by an opera performance, she poses new models of love in line with today’s popular culture. 

This work is part of the collection of the Flemish Community, on loan to M Leuven

Kexin Hao 

Revolution is a Dinner Party

Performance - puppet show

This puppet performance uses a quote from Mao Zedong – ‘Revolution is not a dinner party’ – as a starting point to reflect on food, vermin and intimacy. In this highly visual performance, Hao combines elements of cabaret, puppetry, stand-up and political theatre. She invites a rat, a sparrow and a silverfish, all of whom inhabit a single body, to join her at the table, where the revolution can begin.

Hedwig Houben

The Untamable Hand

Lecture performance - installation

This performance draws on a personal experience in which the artist’s hand suddenly started to tremble uncontrollably. Hedwig Houben weaves together experiences from her own reality with diverse situations and general concepts. With ‘The Untamable Hand’, she offers a reflection on the connection between intentions and execution, social expectations and resistance. At the same time, she reflects on the embodiment of productivity and vulnerability. 

Playground presents both the sculptural installation and live presentations by the artist.

Tarik Kiswanson

The Conservatory (Saint-Denis) 

Video

Learning, uprootment, memory, heritage and the development of identity are key concepts in Tarik Kiswanson’s oeuvre. In this film, children’s hands patiently practise Beethoven’s ‘Ode to Joy’, the official anthem of the European Union. They perform hesitantly and repetitively this song of hope and solidarity, as if it were a piece they are trying to master.

Alongside Playground, recent work by Tarik Kiswanson is on display in the exhibition ‘Threading Landscapes: Art at Park Abbey’ at Museum PARCUM.

Rebecca Lenaerts

Still a bird

Performance

The performance ‘Still a bird’ is a movement towards stillness. A figure, cloaked in feathers, transforms from object to animal, from animal to human. The body explores the tension between closeness and distance – to the space, the objects in the collection and the museum visitor.

Izidora | LETHE

BASSADANZA (LOW DANCE) / (MASC.) FIG. SERPENTINATA / III. ACT

Performance - première

In this creation, a group of dancers engages in a dialogue with the ‘Sculptori Fiamminghi’ exhibition at M. By bringing dancers into dialogue with historical sculptures, she questions how certain Renaissance ideas about the body and gender continue to influence our present thinking. The performance contrasts rigid, sculpted ideals of masculinity – which we continue to see in subcultures and the ‘manosphere’ today – with the fluid, unpredictable presence of living bodies.

Nefeli Papadimouli

Always more than one

Exhibition- performance

Nefeli Papadimouli’s modular installations and portable sculptures function as meeting spaces that invite collective movement. In her practice, she explores how distance, proximity and movement form essential elements within processes of coexistence, social conflict, negotiation and balance. During Playground, her works are activated by multiple bodies. In doing so, the boundaries between the individual and the collective blur, creating space for new forms of interaction and shared experience. 

The solo exhibition 'Nefeli Papadimouli. ANAMESA’ is on view at M until 9 May 2027.