Brenda Guesnet | Etcetera

Brenda Guesnet

Brenda Guesnet is a curator and writer. She works as curator and deputy director for IKOB, a museum of contemporary art in Eupen, Belgium, and is a co-founder of celador, an independent space in Brussels.

SANCTA – Florentina Holzinger

Hot for God

Roller-skating nuns, a chain-vaping Jesus rapping Eminem, live piercings and a pregnant cardinal: Florentina Holzinger arrived in Antwerp trailing fainted audience members, an outraged bishop and lots of headlines. Her operatic mass is indeed excessive, chaotic and deliberately shocking. But Holzinger is not out to get you, she wants to take you along. For all its provocation and even if, at times, it feels the pressure to spell everything out, SANCTA is steeped in a surprising tenderness.

Bottoms up

Anal Pompidou and satire as survival

A cramped upstairs room above a Latin-American restaurant in the Sablon, sixty people crammed around tiny tables. For eight euros, three nights a week, Anal Pompidou turns this improvised stage into Brussels’ most chaotic cabaret, led by Simon Van Schuylenbergh’s delirious alter ego. Intimate, immediate and independent; it is perhaps the most vital art happening in this city wheezing under debt and bureaucracy.