At BPS22 Musée d’art de la Province de Hainaut, the exhibition “Chrysalis” (6 June – 30 August 2026) has opened. Its title refers to the stage in which a caterpillar transforms into a butterfly — the chrysalis, a state in which the new form has not yet fully emerged but is already undergoing profound change. Derived from the Greek, the word is associated with ideas of latency and metamorphosis, a moment when matter unravels and prepares to take on another form. This condition serves as the exhibition’s central lens, framing an exploration of instability, transition and the process of becoming — a space of in-betweenness. The exhibition brings together installation, sculpture, photography, video, painting, poster art and textile works, creating a rich and multilayered dialogue between different media and artistic approaches.
Emilio López-Menchero “Checkpoint Charlie” (2010)
In September 2010, a Checkpoint Charlie suddenly appeared on the Porte de Flandre bridge in Brussels — an exact replica of the famous border crossing that divided East and West Berlin during the Cold War. The artist installed a guard hut, sandbags, flags, and arranged for people dressed as American military police to be present. Cars slowed down, pedestrians stopped, and some even tried to work out whether a real police operation was taking place. The “border guards” told people that they were leaving the American sector and entering the Soviet one, and this absurd statement instantly transformed an ordinary city bridge into a space of political imagination. At the exhibition “Chrysalis” at BPS22 Musée d’art de la Province de Hainaut, the museum precisely reconstructed the 2010 project within its own space.
However, the work was not about Berlin, but about Brussels. López-Menchero chose a site that is often perceived as a symbolic boundary between two different urban realities: the more affluent and rapidly gentrifying city centre, and Molenbeek, a district with a strong migrant presence and a complex social reputation. The artist did not create a new border but made visible one that already existed in collective perception. He showed that contemporary cities remain divided, even though their walls are no longer made of concrete. Today, these divisions run through ideas of wealth and poverty, origin, culture, belonging, and fear.
The most interesting aspect of the project lay not in the structure itself, but in people’s reactions. The work existed through confusion, conversation, debate, and chance encounters. Viewers became participants in a performance without realising it. Art ceased to be an object of contemplation and turned into a social experiment. With a single scenographic gesture, the artist prompted citizens to reflect on why some neighbourhoods feel “ours” and others “theirs”, and how easily people accept the existence of a boundary when it appears convincing.
The strength of Checkpoint Charlie lies in its simplicity. There are no slogans, moralising statements, or ready-made answers. López-Menchero simply relocates a well-known historical symbol and allows it to confront contemporary reality. As a result, an uncomfortable question emerges: if a border can be so easily staged in the centre of a European capital, does this mean it has already existed all along in our collective imagination? It is for this reason that Checkpoint Charlie remains one of the most precise and perceptive artistic works on Brussels in the early twenty-first century — a city that is open and cosmopolitan, yet simultaneously divided by numerous invisible boundaries.
One section of the exhibition focuses on territories and landscapes shaped by history, production, and time. The works of François Martig, Felten-Massinger, Maxime Van Roy, and Olivier Cornil address industrial remnants, abandoned architecture, and transformed natural and urban environments. In these images, time appears as a slow sediment, recording traces of labour, exploitation, and the gradual withdrawal of functional use, while still preserving the presence of enduring material and environmental forms.
The next section of the exhibition is devoted to gestures, situations, and forms of shared presence. In the works of Véronique Vercheval, everyday moments are documented within tense social contexts, where simple actions become significant as forms of sustaining lived experience. The duo Brognon Rollin work with pre-existing situations, reconfiguring the parameters of space and interaction, translating them into a mode of collective negotiation and continuous adjustment.
Gradually, the focus shifts towards the body and internal states. In the works of Benedikte Hendrickx, Barbara Salome Felgenhauer, Hamra Abbas, Sanaam Khatibi, CRÉCIT, and Marie Zolamian, unstable psychological states, narrative fragmentation, questions of desire, vulnerability, domination, and the transmission of experience are explored. The body is considered both as a surface upon which social, cultural, and symbolic structures act simultaneously, and as a space for the possible reorganisation of these influences.
The final section includes works by Edith Dekyndt, VOID, and Loriane Belin, in which the process of becoming form itself becomes the central focus. The practices are based on accumulation, removal, erasure, temporal layering, and shifts in perception. The image and the object emerge as the result of a prolonged process in which meaning is gradually formed, through rhythm and sequences of change.
Overall, “Chrysalis” is structured as a cohesive field of relationships between the works, where the pieces enter into cross-referential links and generate reciprocal contexts. The exhibition proposes a mode of perception in which attention is held on transitional states and on processes of continuous reconfiguration of the collection and of the experience of reading it.
The BPS22 museum in Charleroi has a remarkable tradition that is much appreciated by Belgian art journalists. After the press preview of an exhibition, guests are invited to a specially conceived thematic lunch. The menu is usually developed as an extension of the curatorial concept, with food becoming another way of telling the story of the exhibition.
The museum itself is located in a vast former industrial pavilion dating from the early 20th century, and its bar and café open directly onto the exhibition spaces, so the transition from art to the table happens quite naturally.
For the summer exhibition “Chrysalis”, dedicated to states of metamorphosis, transformation, and anticipation of a new form, the museum team devised a lunch built around the idea of transformation. The meal was conceived as a sequence of metamorphoses. Journalists were served dishes in which a single ingredient passed through several states: raw vegetables were paired with fermented ones, young shoots with pickled roots, and light summer textures gave way to more intense, concentrated flavours. Even the presentation was based on the idea of transition and changing form.
Rather than traditional museum catering, the result was almost a gastronomic commentary on the exhibition—equally transient and fragile, like the “chrysalis” itself, the pupal stage before the emergence of a butterfly.