Ghent is one of the cities of Flanders, a stronghold of the bourgeoisie, and therefore historically French-speaking (the upper social stratum). Forty years ago, it gave the name “Chambres d’Amis” to an art project that temporarily placed artworks in the private homes and apartments of the city’s residents. It took contemporary art out of the “white cube” of the Museum of Contemporary Art and brought it into lived domestic spaces. It encouraged the inhabitants of this historic city, with its vast classical heritage (including Jan van Eyck’s altarpiece), to believe that there was also room in Ghent for contemporary artists. The project became a catalyst for contemporary art, after which the local art scene became livelier, more active, and more innovative.

The Museum of Contemporary Art S.M.A.K. is, with its exhibition “Chambres d’Amis,” commemorating those glorious days of 1986. As a tribute, its director Philippe Van Cauteren, together with the curator of this exhibition, commissioned three artists to create projects that revisit, are inspired by, or pay homage to those original interventions.

Heike Pallanca, Haim Steinbach, and Susanne Kriemann created museum “rooms,” or chambres, each grounded in their own artistic practice. The question they address is how artworks that were originally created for specific off-site locations can be shown again within the museum walls. Two German artists and one American artist (all well established), invited to provide an external perspective, responded brilliantly to the challenge. They brought back into the museum what had once been displaced from it into private homes and apartments. History thus completed its own circle, a kind of samsara.

Residents of Ghent aged 50+ still remember “Chambres d’Amis”: they personally saw it, visited it, and hosted artists and their works in their homes. The exhibition includes photographic documentation, testimonies, and stories from that time.

Panamarenko (1940–2020), a Belgian artist known for his small aeroplanes that “refused to fly” and magnetic shoes for walking on ceilings, intended to transform a bank building into a room in order to express his dissatisfaction with the situation at hand. In the end, he placed a cage filled with dollars in the corridor of the newly built house of the De Wilde family at Olympiadeplein 9. Panamarenko, who disliked such forms of “salon art” exhibitions, protested vehemently in the empty square in front of the house with his artwork, stating: “This is not Impressionism, not Expressionism, but imperialism that we see here in Ghent. Perhaps I should not have taken part, but with this cage of money I can at least express my protest.”

Panamarenko criticised the way art and cultural institutions can become entangled in systems of capital and power.

Heike Pallanca’s installation “Auftauchen, verschwinden… und wieder auftauchen” (“Appearing, disappearing… and appearing again”, 2026) takes as its starting point a work by Jefta Geis from the collection of S.M.A.K.. In 1986, Geis placed doors in the homes of workers in Ghent, transforming them from functional passages into symbolic objects bearing fragments of the French Revolution slogan “liberty, equality, fraternity.” Pallanca reinterprets this gesture by treating the door as an image of boundary and lost function, linking it to broader questions of history and politics. Her work also includes the series “Erdbeben IX – Niemand weiß es” (“Earthquake IX – Nobody knows”), in which mosaic forms depict shifting outlines of continents (the Americas and Eurasia), evoking geological processes that cannot be stopped. The word “STOP” within the composition becomes a paradoxical symbol, as even it seems to “vibrate” within the context of seismic movement. In this way, Pallanca connects the historical ideals of the French Revolution with contemporary issues of borders, instability, and authoritarian systems, showing how doors, maps, and geological fractures become metaphors for political and social boundaries, while her photographs and installations link past and present works into a reflection on memory, spatial transformation, and the impossibility of fixed borders.

Haim Steinbach (USA–Israel), in the context of the “Chambres d’Amis” project in the collection of S.M.A.K., presents a reconstruction and reinterpretation of the idea of Jan Hoet’s “guest room.” The artist selected three works from the original exhibition — “Le Décor et son Double” by Daniel Buren, “Zero & Not” by Joseph Kosuth, and “Sans titre” by Jan Vercruysse — and constructed a new spatial and conceptual dialogue between them.

Using metal structures, Steinbach creates a triangular frame inside which he places a replica of the bed from the guest room of Annik and Anton Herbert, thereby displacing its original position and bringing it into dialogue with the practices of Buren, Kosuth, and Vercruysse. On the bed he places a pillowcase printed with a text from Sigmund Freud’s “The Psychopathology of Everyday Life” (1901), which had previously been crossed out by Joseph Kosuth, referencing his work in which Freud’s text in a psychiatrist’s home was itself conceptually “erased.”

The installation also incorporates Jan Vercruysse’s work — a black-and-white photograph and an empty black frame placed in the room opposite the bed — intensifying themes of absence, representation, and emptiness. Overall, Steinbach, a conceptual artist active since the late 1970s, works through the selection and arrangement of objects, combining artworks, everyday items, and cultural artefacts in order to rethink their meaning through context and spatial relations.

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Susanne Kriemann’s installation “04261986 (abbiamo aperto una Finestra)” (2026) departs from the Chernobyl nuclear disaster of 26 April 1986 and the idea of an invisible yet dangerous reality of radiation, which for the artist becomes a central image of vulnerability and hidden impact. The title refers both to the date of the accident and to the metaphor of an “open window” as a point of potential intrusion, as well as to a work by Carla Accardi created for the 1986 “Chambres d’Amis” exhibition.

For this installation, Kriemann uses seventeen archival photographs from the collection of S.M.A.K., which originally documented the domestic spaces in Ghent ahead of the exhibition and helped artists orient themselves within the interiors. Before reprinting these images, she dusts them with fine particles collected in Ghent, thereby “contaminating” the archival material with a physical trace of the present. Alongside the photographs, she presents objects that reference elements from the 1986 exhibition — linen fabrics, a bucket, a small bird, a table and chair, traces of paint on a wall — yet these are not original artefacts but symbolic stand-ins, evoking a sense of anticipation and potential transformation into art.

In this way, Kriemann constructs an “in-between space” linking past and present, archive and exhibition, private and public spheres, raising questions about what is remembered of Chambres d’Amis, what existed before and during it, and how history persists through images, materials, and invisible traces of time.

But the central voice of the exhibition still belongs to the French artist Daniel Buren, who created “Le Décor et son Double” (1986), now in the collection of S.M.A.K.. The work explores the tension between private and public space within the context of the “Chambres d’Amis” exhibition, where artworks were installed not in a museum but in the homes of residents of Ghent.

Buren, known for his “visual tool” — vertical stripes 8.7 cm wide used as a universal artistic code — created two interconnected parts of the same work: one placed in the private guest room of collectors Annik and Anton Herbert, and a second one in the museum, where its “double” was formed. These two components are visually and conceptually linked: the stripes continue from one space into the other, producing an effect of rupture and continuity at the same time, between the private home and the institutional framework.

After the exhibition ended, the private component remained with the collectors, while the museum version was lost and later reconstructed in 2011 and integrated into the museum’s collection. The work thus highlights the complex system of relations between three types of ownership — private collectors, the museum, and state institutions — and ultimately questions where the artwork actually resides: in the home, in the museum, or in a continuous process of reconstruction and institutional reinterpretation.