Becoming Ancestors seeks to offer an expanded understanding of ancestrality. It brings together Western and Indigenous artists who explore ancestral memories: their fragmentation, repression, persistence, and imaginative potential.

Historically, ancestral knowledge has been closely tied to Indigenous cosmologies and how they look at memory, land and time as non-linear. Reclaiming it has been a vital part of their identity and resistance after centuries of dispossession. Western cultures have long exoticized this different form of knowledge production and transmission, denying the presence and possibilities of ancestrality for the West itself. Through their works, the artists in the exhibition ask what it means to be connected or disconnected from our ancestors, and how both experiences might serve as starting points for imagining different futures.

For Indigenous artists, ancestrality is often a living practice of resistance, rooted in responsibilities of transmission and how ancestral knowledge can help sustain land, language and lineage. Their works connect deeply with the lasting impacts of colonialism and environmental destruction.

For Western artists, explorations of ancestrality take multiple forms. Some begin from loss - the sense of forgetting, rupture or complicity in inherited, colonial violence. Others work to unearth suppressed knowledge - folk practices, pagan traditions, and local wisdom erased over time - asking how reconnecting with these traces can restore lost connections.

It is in this shared space of questioning and connection between distinct histories that Becoming Ancestors generates dialogue and invites reflection on the legacies that shape us. At the same time, it offers a call to reimagine futures through conscious choices rather than inherited patterns.

With works by: Julien Creuzet, Chloë Delanghe & Mattijs Driesen, Els Dietvorst, Forensic Architecture & Salman Abu Sitta, Laura Huertas Millán, Lou Le Forban, MUXX collective (EYIBRA, Oldo Erréve, Lukas Avendaño, nnux), Rana Nazzal Hamadeh, Miguel Peres Dos Santos, Subash Thebe Limbu