How do we imagine living environments in a world facing planetary shifts and ecological challenges? Magical Realism: Imagining Natural Dis/order brings together over thirty artists at WIELS and beyond, offering new ideas and perspectives on our relationship with nature. The exhibition is an invitation to move away from systems driven by endless growth and resource extraction, encouraging connection with the many entanglements that shape our planet.

The title of the exhibition is borrowed from the artistic and literary genre known as magical realism, which is characterised by its infusion of worlds of magic, dreams and myth into mundane narratives—creating stories that redefine the boundaries of reality. The exhibition looks at how the porosity between ‘magic’ and ‘reality’ may open up spaces for other horizons to emerge in response to proliferating monocultures, disposable life, and climate transformation.

When the world of science and hard facts has been torn apart from the world of magic and intuition, how to reconcile this fracture, what traces does it leave and how do we repair it? The exhibition navigates these questions through works that shape worlds via painting, moving image, sound and installation. They engage with different spaces, from the cosmos and its galaxies to the scientist’s lab; matters such as bodies of water, bacterial skins or 3D prints; and geologic processes surfacing through the underground rumbling of the earth or the noise of a sinking city. The artists navigate different, complementary and contradictory ways of relating to ecosystems and myths of the “natural” environment, seeking refuge in dreams and in the raw matter and bare life of the world. At the confluence of analytic and speculative tools, Magical Realism gestures towards restoring connections in a biosphere exhausted by exploitation, dispossession and debt.

Magical Realism follows The Absent Museum (2017) and Risquons-tout (2020), pivotal moments within the WIELS programme, focusing on specific patterns within contemporary artistic practice that underscore the necessity for transformation. Through an exhibition at Wiels, a chapter at argos , a publication and a live program including workshops, talks, walks and performances, Magical Realism reflects an ecology that addresses both the aesthetic implications of our relationship with ‘nature’ and the natural worlds, and their tipping point, as well as the social, economic and scientific implications of exploring and shifting our conceptions of the planet.