It Never SSST

Opens Saturday, May 9 Artist Miet Warlop is representing Belgium at the Biennale Arte 2026 with the exhibition-performance It Never SSST. With this choice, the Flemish Community seeks to showcase the artist’s 20-year body of work, while also recognizing Belgium’s strong tradition of performance and interdisciplinarity. This presentation marks the first time that performance art takes centre stage in the Belgian pavilion. Performers will activate the installation through physical and sculptural rituals. The title refers to the turbulent time in which they keep moving forward, doing anything to avoid a standstill. Warlop’s work explores the urgency of human connection in an increasingly disorienting world, transforming the Belgian Pavilion into a space of energy, tension, and shared emotional experience. — "They navigate a spiralling world in which words themselves lose stability and sing toward that vulnerable threshold in a language that is felt rather than understood." With It Never SSST, Miet Warlop transforms the Belgian pavilion into a charged arena where language, music, and collective disorientation collide. Plaster words circulate through the space: carried, passed along, dragged, and broken. Musical characters sing and search for meaning within these unhinged fragments, which together form the lyrics and emotional score of this exhibition-performance. These characters, a group of musicians and dancers, move through a turbulent atmosphere marked by a growing sense of doom. Through a series of absurd and physical rituals, they keep going, avoiding resignation and stillness at all costs. This vision of the world mirrors our own, wavering between despair and the urge to transcend it into something meaningful and more beautiful. Warlop’s high-performing, energetic, and creative characters grapple with the threat of overload, at times revealing their breaking points. They navigate a spiralling world in which words themselves lose stability and sing toward that vulnerable threshold in a language that is felt rather than understood. By rhythmically switching between languages associated with the work’s presentation contexts in Belgium and Italy, their wordplay becomes an embodied musical experience. The pavilion is never fully silent, even when the performance ends. The thousand words left behind keep resonating this poetry of chaos. Scattered across tribunes that climb the walls, they stand frozen in time. Like remnants of a prayer wall or a karaoke machine from a vanished civilization, they await new voices to once again dive into the pursuit of human connection. One live presence persists throughout: over the seven-month duration of the exhibition, a sculptor translates these performative moments into plaster bas-reliefs. It Never SSST reflects the artist’s twenty-year artistic trajectory and builds on her distinctive, unruly fusion of disciplines, interweaving music, dance and sculpture with theatrical language. Through animated sculptures, tableaux vivants, and performative actions, Warlop develops plastic experimentations with a pronounced scenographic logic. In this new creation, key motifs from her earlier work resurface: the concert as ritual, the rhythm and discipline of sport, the recurring presence of plaster objects.—Within Warlop’s practice, everything interconnects in an unfinished, circular movement. People are often drawn to symbols: forms that make complex ideas and emotions tangible, or that draw an audience into a larger narrative. Miet Warlop’s work speaks directly to this visual desire. It pulls the viewer into the performative world of images while simultaneously lifting a corner of the curtain to reveal the tension beneath. Starting from something personal, she reshapes a hardened emotion into an image or movement that reaches out to everyone and asks: do you feel this too? —Caroline Dumalin, Curator Miet Warlop (b. 1978, Torhout, Belgium, lives and works in Brussels) is a performance artist known for her deeply interdisciplinary work. Her work blends theatre, dance, and visual arts, creating immersive and unexpected experiences. For twenty years, Warlop has made the interplay of visual and performing arts her feeding ground and field of action. Her work is associated with the stage, but always starts from something material and tangible, from her studio. Experiments with plastic materials and physical boundaries are inextricably linked. Warlop earned a Master’s degree in Fine Arts from the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Ghent. When she won the prize for young talent at Theater aan Zee in Ostend in 2004, there was slight consternation. How could a visual artist with no theatre training win a theatre award? She used the prize money to continue developing her path, gaining attention with projects like Sportband / Afgetrainde Klanken and Springville, which have toured worldwide. In 2014, she set up her own production company: Miet Warlop / Irene Wool vzw. She was an artist-in-residence at Campo, Beursschouwburg and NTGent. Notable performances include Mystery Magnet, a playful, liberating fantasy world of action painting which won the Stückemarkt Theatertreffen Prize in Berlin, and Fruits of Labor, which premiered at Kunstenfestivaldesarts in 2016. She has also presented her work at leading art institutions such as Bozar (Brussels), KW Institute (Berlin), and the Palais de Tokyo (Paris). In 2021, she was invited by Wiels as part of the Indiscipline festival at the Casino in Knokke. Recent acclaimed productions include One Song (Avignon Festival, 2022), a requiem of sport and music that was named one of the best theatre performances of the year by The New York Times, and Chant for Hope, a collective sculptural choreography channelling the power of language which premiered at the Dhaka Art Summit in 2023. Her new performance Inhale Delirium Exhale, an explosion of silk and dance, premiered at the Kunstenfestivaldesarts in May 2025. Caroline Dumalin (b. 1986, Bonheiden, Belgium; lives in Brussels) is an art historian, curator, and the Artistic Director of Morpho in Antwerp. Her work centres artists and supports artistic development and experimentation. At Morpho, she develops international residency programmes, collaborative studio projects, and partnerships that aim to promote a more supportive environment for artistic work. This is the experimental purpose of a residency: playing together, bringing people together, forming lasting relationships and contributing to the in-depth development of the artist. Dumalin previously worked as a curator at Wiels in Brussels, where she organised solo exhibitions by Mario García Torres, Hana Miletić, Sophie Podolski as well as Vincent Meessen’s Sire je suis de l’ôtre pays, which built on his show for the Belgian Pavilion at the 2015 Venice Biennale. Between 2014-2015, she coordinated Koyo Kouoh’s exhibition titled Body Talk: Feminism, Sexuality and the Body in the Work of Six African Women Artists, and supported curator Elena Filipovic in organising Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker’s performance exhibition Work/Travail/Arbeid. She also co-curated the group exhibitions Open Skies, The Absent Museum and Foreign Places, and coordinated the Wiels Residency Programme. As independent curator, she curated the public art trail Endless Express for Europalia arts festival, featuring new creations by Che Go Eun, Inas Halabi, Flaka Haliti, Chloé Malcotti, Sophie Nys, Marina Pinsky and Laure Prouvost presented along the stations and tracks of the cross-country railway line between Ostend and Eupen. She is the editor of Le pays où tout est permis, the first monograph dedicated to the Brussels artist and poet Sophie Podolski (1953-1974). Her texts have appeared in magazines such as De Witte Raaf, Metropolis M and Mousse. She is a board member of Jester, an artist residency and presentation space in Genk. She studied art history at KU Leuven and the Université Paris-Sorbonne and Art Criticism & Writing at the School of Visual Arts in New York. Commissioner: Caroline Gennez, Flemish Minister for Welfare and Poverty Reduction, Culture and Equal Opportunities Curator: Caroline Dumalin