In Botanique’s spring exhibitions, images don’t sit still; they mutate. Across Museum, Galerie and Les Serres, three projects turn Botanique into a time machine: paintings slip into moving allusions, fossils become speculative relics, and plants morph into carriers of memory. Together, they ask what kind of traces we leave behind – in stone, in images, in each other.
Emilie Terlinden - Timelapse
05.02-26.04.2026, Museum
In Timelapse, Brussels-based painter Emilie Terlinden treats images as matter to cut, fold and reassemble long before any brush touches the surface. Fragments from classical European painting, everyday snapshots and floral still lifes are collaged into dens, Baroque-esque constellations where nothing fully resolves into a single, coherent scene.
<img class="editorial-image-50-left" src="https://cdn.prod.website-files.com/61eebcc683107b99137f4423/698b0409ecdc02ff86bdd171_Untitled%20design%20(2).avif"/>
<img class="editorial-image-50-right" src="https://cdn.prod.website-files.com/61eebcc683107b99137f4423/698b0408a214bb8126264e63_Untitled%20design%20(1).avif"/>
For Botanique, she amplifies this research through an immersive diorama inspired by Louis Daguerre’s 19th-century light theatre and the 200th anniversary of photography. A monumental double-sided canvas shifts from day to night under a programmed choreography of front and back lighting, turning Gothic ruins, Brueghel-esque figures, animals and flowers into a moving apparition. Here, light does not simply illuminate the image; it edits it in real time, collapsing painting, scenography and pre-cinema into a single device.
Across the exhibition, photography appears not as an endpoint but as a provisional capture, a fleeting configuration to be reworked, erased and pushed to the edge of abstraction. Timelapse ultimately asks how painting can still register time today - not as a frozen instant, but as the afterimage of all the transformations an image has already undergone.
Ghita Remy - Mythica
05.02-22.03.2026, Galerie
Mythica opens with a disarming question: what if our geological layers were already full of scientific, mythical and speculative stories all at once? Belgian-Italian artist Ghita Remy weaves archaeology, natural sciences and mythology into installations that feel part museum display, part future excavation site. In her ‘Techno-fossiles’, handmade stones fuse plastic fragments with animal remains, compressing past, present and future into a single cross-section that gently mocks any linear reading of time. Elsewhere, sculptural time capsules preserve curated traces of the present, confronting us with the subjectivity of what we choose to remember or let vanish.
<img class="editorial-image-50-left" src="https://cdn.prod.website-files.com/61eebcc683107b99137f4423/698b04099d42219079f730e3_Untitled%20design%20(1)%20copy.avif"/>
<img class="editorial-image-50-right" src="https://cdn.prod.website-files.com/61eebcc683107b99137f4423/698b04089c2b2a58f5c85aa8_Untitled%20design%20(1)%20copy%202.avif"/>
Threading through the show is the recurring figure of the vagina dentata, historically a symbol of fear around female sexuality, which Remy reclaims as a protective, emancipatory force. Her objects oscillate between ritual artefact, fake relic and scientific instrument, suggesting a ‘future archaeology’ built as much from emotional and political sediments as from material ones. In Mythica we are not simply looking at artefacts; we are confronted with our own anxieties about legacy, responsibility and whether we can act as good ancestors at all.
Valentine Jolibois & Elvy Tremor - Lacrymatory / What Lies in the Puddle
05.02-15.03.2026, Les Serres
Brussels-based Valentine Jolibois and Elvy Tremor turn Botanique’s greenhouses into a testing ground for speculative rituals. Lacrimatory, Jolibois’ solo chapter revisits a historical misreading: small vessels found near ancient graves were long seen as ‘tear bottles’ before being identified as simple ointment flasks. She reanimates that discarded theory by staging the artefacts of a fictional tear-based religion – unworn costumes, a ceramic stoup and sculptural fragments – as if they were remnants of a quiet ceremony. Soft-painted and quilted textiles wrap around fragile ceramics, industrial hardware and metal objects, holding a tension between protection and exposure, comfort and constraint.
<img class="editorial-image-50-left" src="https://cdn.prod.website-files.com/61eebcc683107b99137f4423/698b040878177b726d873c2b_Untitled%20design%20(1)%20copy%203.avif"/>
<img class="editorial-image-50-right" src="https://cdn.prod.website-files.com/61eebcc683107b99137f4423/698b040878177b726d873c20_Untitled%20design%20(1)%20copy%204.avif"/>
Under the alias Elvy Tremor, Jolibois teams up with Léonore Bienert for What Lies in the Puddle, a wall installation that rewrites Hans Christian Andersen’s The Marsh King’s Daughter through a knowingly syrupy lens. Repeated scenes from the fairy tale slide from narrative into ornament, forming a sprawling tableau where sweetness turns slightly uncanny. Together, Jolibois and Bienert construct ambiguous environments that sit between fiction, display and devotional set-up, modelling a speculative liturgy for an era of atmospheric anxiety.
<div class="editorial-banner"> <div class=“editorial-credits”>@botanique_expo<br>botanique.be/en/expositions</div>
Different Class works with the interest of their community at heart.
Our work’s purpose is to foster a solid network for independent artists, those who love them, and those who want to support them. Become a member to contribute to the local Belgian art scene.
Our membership
