Dear ARGOS visitor,

The effects of the corona pandemic continue to challenge the ways we exhibit and experience art, as we ease out of the full lockdown. At the same time, “news” of violent and ongoing structural and institutional racism continues to move and shake us. At ARGOS we have been thinking about both of these crises and how we can address them moving forward.

Fully supporting the global Black Lives Matter protests, and especially its Belgian iterations, we acknowledge that ARGOS has not always been at the forefront of addressing issues of diversity, as a quick glance at our collection might reveal. (A necessary first step in expanding the scope of our collection and distribution activities led to the appointment of three visiting curators of distribution earlier this year.)

Yet instead of holding on to this past, we want to invite you to join us in building ways to use the institutional platform ARGOS grants us to amplify the creative voices of people of colour and non-white organisations.

To accomplish this goal, we will continue to establish relationships with POC partners, individual as well as institutional, in Brussels and beyond, as we have started doing more consciously over the past year. We look to these connections in order to establish constructive ways to work together curatorially, artistically, and more generally as a reflection of the inspiring diversity we encounter in Brussels everyday.

At the same time, we will spend the summer months strategising about solutions to showing and experiencing art offline in this new corona reality. In order to do this, we have opted to delay the re-opening of our physical space until September. This entails not merely implementing safety measures, but a reimagining of the relationship between our visitors and ARGOS in ways that we find valuable and interesting.

Stay tuned for updates both short and long term. And please don’t forget to support, or continue to support anti-racist organisations in Belgium, as well as our colleagues at SOS Relief

Take care,

Niels Van Tomme /ARGOS