M HKA Ensembles

From women’s emancipation to homosexual and transgender rights.
In our society, relational patterns between and among the sexes are becoming increasingly fluid. The basic oppositions are no longer sufficient to grasp our sexual identity, as is also the case in other fields. The individual freedom that our democracy guarantees constantly requires going beyond the protection of linguistic communities and other minorities.

The Senate includes as many men as women and is presided, for the third time in its history, by a woman. The assembly drafted information reports on issues like co-parenthood and surrogacy, as well as to gender equality.

Jan Van Imschoot (°1963, living in Ghent) loves what is hidden, denied, excluded or forgotten. He thus features individuals living at the margins of society. In this striking portrait of a transsexual, he reveals a human being inhabited by feelings and internal conflicts.

This diptych by Jean-François Octave (°1955, living in Brussels) juxtaposes the face of a Russian sailor, which became a gay icon, and a sentence inspired by the song Just an Illusion by the funk disco group Imagination. Using the theme of masculinity, the work places the ideological divides of the Cold War side by side.

Miriam Cahn (°1949, living in Basel and Bergell) questions the role of the body in the cultural and social life as a place of oppression and expression. She’s a feminist and her work reveals a new form of body expression, as evidenced by this naked masculine body, a rare theme in the history of art, distorted by a particularly expressive and personal vision.

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