Kunsthal Mechelen is looking for a fellow to join our team in the first half of 2025. The particular focus of this fellowship is the group exhibition curated by Alicja Melzacka, scheduled to open in March 2025.
About the project
Kunsthal Mechelen is a generous, open house for contemporary art. Without a centralized base of operations the workings of Kunsthal will extend to different spaces in the city, including public space.
As a multi-faceted art house, Kunsthal Mechelen offers a safe haven to a myriad of voices and faces. Interchanging formations of artists, curators, thinkers and collectives bring the house to life in a program that doesn’t let itself be limited to one fixed artistic frame. In consultation with an advisory commission, orientations are redesignated and new as well as familiar voices are brought; young and experienced, local and international, more or less professional. They are paid fairly and supported with care and attention. There’s no fixed curator at Kunsthal Mechelen, instead we invite a different curator for each exhibition to start from their own practice.
Alicja Melzacka often works at the intersection of visual arts and language, curating exhibitions and programmes, writing and speaking along. She tries to cultivate a certain ecology of practice, placing importance on long-term engagement, dialogical processes, and collaborative research.
The upcoming group exhibition at Kunsthal Mechelen is conceived as a composition for several voices, unfolding over three months, from March to June 2025. The notion of ‘voice’ is chosen not only for its figurative but also its literal sense, as the project brings together nine artists working predominantly with words and sounds, across the disciplines of visual arts, music, and poetry.
The exhibition explores the material, temporal, and political dimensions of language, and particularly, of the variants that are deemed non-normative by the linguistic and medical communities. The invited artists embrace disfluency, distortion, and illegibility as strategies of resistance against the reality where efficient and specialized communication is used to categorize people and accelerate the flow of transactions. Some employ techniques of notation, translation, and transmission as artistic strategies, shifting the focus from explicit messages to the meanings found in dissonances, disruptions, hesitations, and pauses.
Melzacka will also be exploring the idea of the exhibition as a score, where various pieces ‘perform’ at different times, entering into polyphonic or dialogical relationships. Within this frame, the public program will be considered equal to the exhibition both in concept and communication. Many of the invited artists will develop new works – amongst them performances and (sound) installations – meaning that the exhibition will be preceded by a research and development period.
What do we offer?
A varied program centered around a clear goal. While the end product is an exhibition, you’ll be able to experience working with artists on the creation of new and adaptation of existing works. Thinking through the exhibition format and related aspects of documentation and mediation are other areas where your input will be appreciated. A significant portion of the fellowship period will focus on the production of the exhibition as well as development and realisation of the public programme.
As a fellow you’ll be mostly working directly with the curator, who has previous experience of working with a curatorial fellow. You’ll also be in close contact with the team of Kunsthal Mechelen, who offer their logistical support towards the production of the exhibition.
At Kunsthal Mechelen we work with a small team, as such you will also be asked to take over certain communication and production tasks related to the exhibition.
What we’re looking for
· Someone rooted in the contemporary art field; a keen interest in text-based practices and writing is a plus.
· Someone who is comfortable with weekend work and being involved in public events, which often take place during those days.
· Someone who is eager to work along and contribute to the pre-established body of research,
· and is interested in implementing the exhibition concept during the production and mediation phases.
· Someone with strong communicative skills in English, Dutch-speaking is a plus.
Fee
€ 4892,45 according to 5 weeks CAO PC 329.01 B1C 5 calculated with 5 years
Duration
5 weeks, i.e. 25 work days, to be distributed in dialogue with the organisers, in the period from January to mid-June 2025. Weekend days will be compensated on a different day.
Suggested schedule:
01 Jan - 01 Feb – one day a week (4 days)
01 Feb - 22 Mar – two days a week (16 days)
22 Mar - 15 June – remaining 5 days
How to apply
Please direct your email to Steven Op de Beeck at steven.opdebeeck@mechelen.be, using the subject line "Fellowship Application."
We kindly ask that you submit your CV and/or portfolio along with a brief motivation statement (maximum 500 words), all compiled into a single PDF. The deadline for submissions is 15 November.