Visual arts

More names will follow soon

STEF VAN LOOVEREN

Stef Van Looveren (1992) is an Antwerp based multidisciplinary genderfluid artist. They studied Fine Arts at Central Saint Martins, London and Sint Lucas Antwerp. Stef Van Looveren’s practice translates itself into video installation, photo, sculpture and performance. Van Looveren uses the installations as an attempt to reflect and dismantle the performativity of our human behaviour, primarily within the notion of gender. Playfully mimicking our social conducts along with visual culture, their work moves towards a surreal gesture. Stef is also a member on the AQAF artistic team since this year.

TRAVIS ALABANZA

Travis Alabanza is a performer, writer and theatre maker. In the last two years they have been noted by numerous publications, such as ARTSY, ID and MOBO _AWARDS, as one of the most prominent emerging queer artistic voices, and also listed in OUT as an influential queer figure, appeared in campaigns with MAC X ASOS and performed across the country and internationally. Their unique mixture of performance, poetry, style, political views and risk taking performances has given them a unique placement both nationally and internationally.

UGO WOATZI

Ugo Woatzi (1991) is a Photographer and Visual Artist working between Brussels (BE) and Johannesburg (SA). He graduated from the Market Photo Work of Johannesburg in 2016 and finished his master with distinction at the Luca School Of Arts in Brussels in 2019. He exhibited at BOZAR Brussels, Recyclart Brussels and Hazard Gallery Johannesburg. we will show his works, thematizing visibility. Woatzi provides the images to a conversation between masculinities and spaces, evoking the love, fear, joy and safe environments of people that exist outside heteronormative constructs that can be suffocating.

MARCEL LENNARTZ

Marcel Lennartz is an Antwerp based photographer. Originally graduated as a graphic designer he put his focus on photography as he is more interested in humans than comma's. Lennartz loves to watch people, not as a voyeur but more as a person for who personal contact is most important. Marcel documented fetish event Darklands and this series will debut during the AQAF festival.

FLEUR PIERETS

Fleur Pierets is a Belgian artist and award winning LGBTQ+ activist whose work questions the construction and mainstream understanding of queer identity. She is the founding editor of Et Alors? Magazine, an online publication devoted to LGBTQ+ politics, fashion, identity, and other issues. In 2017, she and her wife, Julian Boom came up with the idea for a performance art project in which they would get married in every country that had legalized same-sex marriage (22 when they started the project, now 28). After four countries, Julian was diagnosed with brain cancer and died approximately six weeks later, on January 22, 2018. Fleur wrote a book called “Julian” about the work she and her wife did as a female artist couple and the devastation that comes with losing the love of your life. The book has been published in September 2019 by Dutch publisher Das Mag. Fleur is also on board of the AQAF artistic team.

JOANNA

GROCHOWSKA

Polish artist Joanna Grochowska shows works from her series "XXY". Its focus is on bodily transformation after sex surgery. Exploring notions of pleasure, beauty, pain, transgression in the context of the human form. The imagery depicting a person as a mannequin, blurs the distinction between Human and Nonhuman. Still, passive, faceless figures refer to void, emptiness, tabula rasa; inventing of new desires and transgression.