(-./) dash-dot.slash/(in parentheses)

Curating an exhibition is perhaps comparable to punctuation: it is the art of ordering, interrupting, connecting, and opening. Just as punctuation marks give direction to language without being the story itself, so the curator structures a space in which works enter into dialogue with one another, collide, breathe, and resonate.

In (-./), artists from the Bilzen-Hoesselt region and beyond are brought together in a temporary grammatical field of images, materials, and ideas. The title refers to punctuation marks as a form of thinking: the ‘dash’ as break and movement, the sign of the unexpected leap; the ‘dot’ as a moment of concentration, stillness, or decision; the ‘slash’ as separation and alternative, as a choice between possible meanings; and the ‘parentheses’ as space within the space — a side path, a nuance, a thought that unfolds alongside the main sentence.

This exhibition views the former fire station not merely as a backdrop, but as an active context. A building that was once characterized by urgency, intervention, and readiness now becomes a place of slowing down, reflection, and imagination. Where once there was a response to necessity, space now emerges for attention. The architecture still carries its past within it: functional, robust, open. At the same time, it invites reinterpretation, the rewriting of its meaning through the presence of art.

Within this environment, a trajectory of voices, gestures, and perspectives unfolds. Not as a closed narrative, but as a composition of fragments — sometimes harmonious, sometimes abrasive — in which each artist applies their own syntax. The exhibition seeks not uniformity, but rhythm; not consensus, but coherence in difference. It is therefore not an answer, but an invitation: to read, to wander, to connect, and to pause. To experience art as language beyond words, and the exhibition as a sentence that is only completed in the gaze of its reader.

Mounir Eddib contributed The house I never built (2025), a lead sculpture covered with tar.

Curated by Joke Hansen and Petrus Vanlessen
Photography by Charlotte Ramaekers