Ouvrons grand les portes de la perception !
Qu’est-ce que le mouvement, au juste ? Et pourquoi les images fixes semblent-elles parfois prendre vie ? Au cours de cet atelier, nous plongerons dans l’univers fascinant des illusions d’optique et des expériences visuelles. Sur les traces d’artistes, de scientifiques et de pionniers du cinéma, nous découvrirons comment nos yeux et notre cerveau collaborent pour créer le mouvement. Car parfois, la plus grande magie ne se trouve pas à l’écran, mais dans notre propre regard.

As the Revolution takes to the streets of Tehran, the artworks preserved in Mohsen and Selma’s home resist in their own way.

Before the 1979 Iranian Revolution, archaeologist Mohsen Moghadam and his French wife, Selma Kouyoumdjian, transformed their Tehran home into a museum, filling it with antiquities, artworks and fragments of vanished civilisations: the tangible traces of a life built together.
Without dialogue, and constructed from thirty years of letters exchanged between them, Ça reste entre nous tells a love story through what it has left behind. Beyond the house, another story unfolds: a country transformed by Revolution and war, slowly reshaping the world they built together.

This screening is organized as part of Become the Sky which is available free of charge until the 5th of December 2026. 

At 4:00 PM, you can join the guided tour of the exhibition with the curator and the artists. 

Free, booking required : accueil@iselp.be

How does an idea become a work of art? Artist William Kentridge reveals a few secrets.

In Self-Portrait as a Coffee-Pot, William Kentridge opens his Johannesburg studio to show how ideas emerge, evolve and sometimes fail. Episodes 1 and 9 offer two perspectives on this creative process: from experiments in the studio to a collective journey involving musicians, performers and a brass band.

This screening accompanies Bozar’s exhibition William Kentridge. I am not me, the horse is not mine till the 7th of March 2027.

Episodes: 1 — A Natural History of the Studio — 24' 9 — In Defence of Optimism — 29'

BAFF & WIELS

Three short films by Lebanese artist Ali Cherri

Somniculus – 14′
The Disquiet – 20′
Petrified – 12′

Across these three short films, Lebanese artist Ali Cherri explores how the past continues to inhabit the present. From museums to landscapes and archaeological sites, fossils, statues and other traces become silent witnesses to wars, conquests, displacement and violence.

In partnership with WIELS. From the 5th of September 2026 till the 3rd of January 2027, Soul Witness brings together several major bodies of work by Ali Cherri (b. 1976, Beirut) for the first time. Spanning audiovisual works, sculptures, watercolours and installations, the exhibition explores how institutions of power — from the nation-state and the military to the museum — shape the ways history is constructed and remembered.

SESSION PRESENTED BY HELENA KRITIS, CURATOR OF THE ALI CHERRI EXHIBITION AT WIELS WIELS

Self-portrait of Barbara Hammer, a pioneer of experimental lesbian cinema who continually questioned how a life can be told, preserved and passed on.

In Tender Fictions, Hammer creates an autobiography in her own image: free and elusive. Super 8 footage, personal archives, testimonies, appropriated excerpts and imagined fragments come together in a collage where she investigates her own life as much as she reinvents it. With constant humour and exhilarating formal inventiveness, she blurs the boundaries between archive, memory and fiction.

Somewhere between restoration and reappropriation, this session explores the past: what are we looking at when we look at a work of art? Who is speaking, who is being looked at, and who has the power to tell the story?

En 1958, Paul Haesaerts filme les objets d’art du Congo belge dans Sous le masque noir. Peintre, critique et historien d’art devenu cinéaste, Haesaerts est alors l’une des grandes figures du film sur l’art en Belgique. S’il filme les oeuvres avec une attention remarquable aux formes, aux matières et aux gestes, son regard reste pourtant celui de son époque, traversé par les représentations coloniales. Les objets sont montrés, commentés, interprétés, sans jamais pouvoir prendre la parole.

Plus de soixante ans plus tard, Matthias De Groof retourne ce dispositif avec Sous le masque blanc : le film qu’Haesaerts aurait pu faire. À partir des images originales, il imagine un contrechamp radical : les masques congolais deviennent des sujets et s’adressent directement au public en lingala, à travers les mots d’Aimé Césaire dans Discours sur le colonialisme, portés par la voix de la poétesse et slameuse Maravilha Munto.

The screening will be followed by a conversation with filmmaker, philosopher and researcher Matthias De Groof and sociologist Véronique Clette-Gakuba on coloniality and postcoloniality in arts and culture.