Take Back The Joy

Nelleke Cloosterman | Nokukhanya Langa | Paulo Nimer Pjota | Pieter Vermeersch

23 MAY - 28 June 2026 | Penitentenstraat 29, 9000 Gent

Positivity as an Act of Resistance

In a climate where attention is increasingly driven by outrage, fear, and division, this exhibition proposes another mode of engagement. Rather than amplifying friction, it brings together practices that reshape how we relate to complexity, tension, and one another. Positivity is approached here not as naive optimism or denial, but as a deliberate stance, a way of holding space for questioning, ambiguity, multiplicity, and transformation. Across the works, objects, images, bodies, materials, and colours do not oppose one another, but coexist, overlap, and shift in meaning. Fragments are not resolved into a single narrative; instead, they form constellations in which different temporalities and references remain simultaneously present.

What may at first appear disarmingly open or even light gradually reveals a deeper insistence, a refusal to reduce, to polarise, or to fix meaning too quickly. Some works engage directly with representation and identity, others with the physicality of gesture or the layering of cultural memory, while others create conditions in which perception itself can slow down and recalibrate. Together, they propose a form of resistance that operates on a micro level, not through confrontation, but through attention, care, and subtle shifts in perception. In doing so, the exhibition opens a space where complexity is not something to overcome, but something to inhabit.

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Nelleke Cloosterman  (b. 1996, Wuustwezel, Belgium) lives and works in London, UK. Having completed a bachelor’s degree in visual arts and a Master’s degree in Fine Arts from KASK, BE, Cloosterman completed a postgraduate in Fine Arts at HISK, Ghent, BE. Cloosterman explores identity, female representation, and the coexistence of different belief systems, woven together through the lens of symbolism and personal history. Nelleke Cloosterman's paintings appear at first glance in the Vanitas fashion, still lifes of flowers, birds, fruit and candles, 17th-century imagery of expensive worldly possessions. But across the works are a series of small rebellions that manipulate the model of the Vanitas. Void-like settings, usually a non-descript room with the suggestion of a boundary, a wall, a curtain, an end, are opened up by Cloosterman. Walls become endless skies and dense forests, expanding the scope of the paintings across worlds. Here, multiple realities seem to exist, exchanged in thin layers of oil paint. This activates the objects in the paintings; birds are uncaged, flying wingless against an expanse of blue.

Solo Exhibitions include Between What Is Ours, PLUS-ONE Projects, Antwerp, Belgium (2025), Song of Invisible Boundaries, Indigo+Madder London, UK (2024), Dawn Goes Down To Day, PLUS-ONE Gallery, Antwerpen, Belgium (2023), Cardshark, CENTRALE for contemporary art, Brussels, Belgium (2022). Group Exhibitions include Growth of the Soil, Kristin Hjellegjerde Gallery, London, UK; Painting After Painting, S.M.A.K. Museum of Contemporary Art, Ghent, Belgium (2025), Art Antwerp, PLUS-ONE Gallery, Antwerpen, Belgium; Reflections, EU Council Buildings, Belgium (2024), Face Time, PLUS-ONE Gallery, Antwerpen, Belgium; Summer Show, Barbé Gallery, Knokke, Belgium; Beyond Borders, Verduyn Gallery, Moregem, Belgium (2023), Everybody Has A Plan Until, BARBÉ, Gent, Belgium; Infinite Flowers, PLUS-ONE Gallery, Antwerpen, Belgium; Kunsterfestival, Aardenburg, Netherlands; Neon Memories, BARBE!, Gent, Belgium; Altered States, PLUS-ONE Gallery, Antwerpen, Belgium; I know why the caged bird sings, WARP, Sint-Niklaas, Belgium (2022), Various Positions, HISK, Brussel, Belgium; Belgium Art & Design Fair, Gent, Belgium; The HISK Affair, Brussel, Belgium; Sonsbeek 20-24 conjunctions, Arnhem, Netherlands (2021), Inside-Out, Royal Museum of Fine Arts, Brussels, Belgium; Zomersalon 2020, Kunsthal Gent, Belgium; Salon des artistes, Ronse, Belgium; Artivirals, Maaltebrugge kasteel Gent, Belgium (2020), Graduation 19, KASK Gent, Belgium (2019), Het doel heiligt de middelen, Croxhapox Gent, Belgium (2018). Nelleke Cloosterman’s public collections include The Belgian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Painting, Home-Making, BE; MHKA, HISK Silkscreen: Sonsbeek, BE; Mu.ZEE, HISK Silkscreen: Sonsbeek, BE; IKOB, SISK Silkscreen: Sonsbeek, BE; Vrienden v/h SMAK, HISK Silkscreen: Sonsbeek, BE. Additionally, she completed the residency The Fores Project, London, UK (2025).

Nokukhanya Langa (born in 1991 in Silver Spring, Maryland, USA, and now based in Rotterdam, Netherlands)' s work leaves room for different possibilities, opportunities and (time) perspectives. In her art practice she reconciles the pluralities of her personal story with political and cultural history. Nokukhanya Langa grew up across different parts of the world, from the United States to South Africa, to India, back to the United States, then to the Netherlands for her studies, and to Belgium for a postgraduate degree, before eventually settling again in Rotterdam in the Netherlands.The memories and personal relationships she formed in each of these places have shaped her into the artist she is today. It is as if she temporarily embedded herself everywhere she lived, only to depart again like a ghost in every town, leaving behind certain marks, a kind of scars, both within herself and within the people and places she encountered. These memories of feelings, moments, and relationships are, as it were, encapsulated in stone shaped objects, resembling tablets from a distant past. This trajectory of life forms one of the core elements of her oeuvre. At the same time, the artist’s mental fabric plays a significant role. The complexity of mental chaos, doubt, and tension takes form through bouncing spheres, spirals, and heavy chain installations. These emerge from the image that a downwarts spiral is a loaded spring, a spiral that can only exist through the application of force.This tension and neuronal interplay form the culmination of a multifaceted body of work, in which questioning, doubt, memory, and poetry converge both formally and conceptually.

Nokukhanya Langa holds a MA in Painting from Frank Mohr Institute in Groningen, NL and a Post Graduate at HISK, Ghent, BE. BARBÉ has presented her works in many exhibitions in and outside the gallery with a solo exhibition 'nana' in 2025. In 2024 she had a duo show with Bruce Nauman 'Noku / Nauman' at Saatchi Yates (London, UK) where she previously she had her debut solo in in 2022 'There's A Ghost In Every Town'. In 2025 she participated in 'It Goes Without Saying' at Kunsthal Extra City (Antwerp, BE). Nokukhanya Langa's work has also been exhibited at major institutions including, Centre Pompidou, Paris, France (2020-2021); Kunstinstituut Melly, Rotterdam, NL (2022) and chi K11 Art Museum in Shanghai, CN (2023) and SMAK, Ghent, BE (2025).

Paulo Nimer Pjota (b. 1988, São José do Rio Preto, Brazil) lives and works in São Paulo. The starting point of Paulo Nimer Pjota’s works is the nature of collectively originated phenomena. Studying iconographies of shared popular and art-historical authorship, the artist draws from the urban culture that nourished his cultural upbringing and awakening to interpret and express new ways of thinking through overlapping forms. In the way hip-hop and other analogous forms of urban culture remix known forms through sampling, Pjota bridges temporalities, clustering, for example, archetypal counter-cultural elements with Greco-Roman and precolonial societies’ aesthetics. Renderings of plants, isolated words, cartoon figures, tattoos, wayward scrawls, accents from seventeenth-century Dutch and Flemish still lifes, and artifacts from pre-Columbian and Hellenic art float in constellations of suspended forms. The resulting dreamlike compositions conjure mythological atmospheres and ritualistic landscapes united by a cyclical weaving together of plural, rapturous dialogues. The artist’s nearly insomniac practice is determined to unearth what – at the other end of the flux of artistic production – remains embedded in memory while at the margins of official history.

By juxtaposing everyday objects with references from the past, he critiques the inefficiency of hierarchical knowledge systems that separate elite and popular culture. Pjota’s compositions reveal a production of images and symbols, produced, remixed, and circulated, often exposing social inequalities in the process. As curator Mateus Nunes remarks, “To remix history is to rebel against the hegemonic and violent cultural system, defending an inevitable contamination of time, history, and image by the confrontation between symbols, spiritualities, and cultural expressions.”

The artist’s solo exhibitions include Os alquimistas estão chegando, Mendes Wood DM, Paris (2025); A Lua e Eu, Kunstinstituut Melly, Rotterdam (2025); Na Boca do Sol, Mendes Wood DM, New York (2024); Do cômico e do trágico, Mendes Wood DM, São Paulo (2023); Every Empire Breaks Like a Vase, The Power Station, Dallas (2021); Cenas de Casa, Caixa de Pandora, Ivani and Jorge Yunes Collection, São Paulo (2019); Medley, Mendes Wood DM, São Paulo (2018); The history in repeat mode – image, Mendes Wood DM, Brussels (2017); The history in repeat mode – symbol, Maureen Paley and Morena di Luna, Hove (2017).

Additionally, his work has been included in institutional group exhibitions such as Works from the Colección Jumex, Jumex, Mexico City (2025); 38th Panorama de Arte Brasileira: Mil Graus [A Thousand Degrees], Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo (MAM-SP) at Museu de Arte Contemporânea da Universidade de São Paulo (MAC USP), São Paulo (2024); La mirada encendida, Fundacion Osde, Buenos Aires (2024); X Pink 101, X Museum, Beijing (2024); Private Passion - New Acquisitions in the Astrup Fearnley Collection, Astrup Fearnley Museet, Oslo (2019); Trouble in Paradise, Kunsthal Rotterdam, Rotterdam (2019); Sea of Desire, Fondation Carmignac, Porquerolles (2018); The Marvellous Cacophony, 57th October Salon, Belgrade (2018); O Triângulo Atlântico, 11th Mercosul Biennial, Porto Alegre (2018); Painting |or| Not, The KaviarFactory, Lofoten (2017); Soft Power, Kunsthal KAdE, Amersfoort (2016); 19th Sesc_Videobrasil, São Paulo (2015); Here There, Qatar Museums – Al Riwaq, Doha (2015); Imagine Brazil, Astrup Fearnley Museet, Oslo (2013); DHC/ART Foundation for Contemporary Art, Montreal (2015); 12th Lyon Biennale, Lyon (2013). In collaboration with Mendes Wood DM

Pieter Vermeersch (b. 1973 in Kortrijk, Belgium. Lives and works in Brussels, Belgium and Torino, Italy.) Originating from photographic sources, Pieter Vermeersch’s work deploys painting as an instrument to create images that perpetually oscillate between abstraction and representation. In scanning the extremities of the medium and its relationship to architecture he looks for the degree zero of an image by exploring how time, space and matter constitute the three main elements. Throughout his work, these elements are mixed with subtle variations as in his colour-graded wall paintings and canvases. Vermeersch’s color gradients are the result of a meticulous and almost mathematical process by which the artist becomes a kind of human printer – blending paint into a smooth and seamless surface he conceals any trace of the labor involved in the making of the painting. Behind their seemingly straightforward appearance, these paintings are the complex condensation of an ancient technique along with the painterly attempt to render the interpretation of a photographic source. Through this complex process, Pieter Vermeersch’s paintings liberate themselves from objective referents to allow the viewer to fully experience the effect created by the all-over.

Pieter Vermeersch has been featured in more than 30 solo exhibitions as STUK Kunstencentrum, Leuven (2006); White Box, New York (2009); Londonewcastle Project Space, London (2011) and recently Blueproject Foundation, Barcelona (2016). His work has been shown, amongst others, in group exhibitions at S.M.A.K, Ghent (2017), Fondation Etrillard, Paris (2016); Kenopoku Festival, Japan (2016); MSK, Museum of Fine Arts, Ghent (2015); Parasol Unit, London (2015); L’Espace de l’Art Concret, Mouans- Sartoux (2015); Redcat, Los Angeles (2014); MAC’s, Grand-Hornu (2014); Logan Center Gallery, Chicago (2013); Urdaibai Arte (2012); Casino Luxembourg, Luxembourg (2011); S.M.A.K, Ghent (2010); Mu.ZEE, Ostend (2010); Kunstverein Medienturm, Graz (2009); South London Gallery, London (2009) Bozar, Brussels (2007); M HKA, Antwerp (2006). Over the past two years, he has realized monumental frescoes for the Schuman station in Brussels and the Galeries Lafayette in Biarritz, as well as a major site-specifc work at Solo House Office KGDVS in Matarraña, Spain and Silos a sel, site de la Voirie, Genève, Switzerland. The works of Pieter Vermeersch are part of the collections of Dexia Art Collection, Brussels; European Central Bank, Frankfurt am Main; Flemish Community Art Collection, Brussels; Flemish Parliament, Brussels; Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris; ING Art Collection, Brussels; M HKA, Antwerp; National Bank of Belgium, Brussels; S.M.A.K., Ghent. In collaboration with Galerie Greta Meert.

Opening Saturday 23 May 2026 | 15.00 - 19.00
Exhibition: 23/05 - 28/06/2026
Penitentenstraat 29, 9000 Gent

Contact us for more information or to request a preview catalog:
+32 (0)9 391 39 13
desk@barbegallery.be