Programme

Exhibitions open – 19:00–23:00

Inbox exhibition I You Me We Us – 5th floor
Featuring works by Laura Palau, Alex Reynolds, Margaret Salmon, Andrea Zavala Folache & Adriano Wilfert Jensen.

Collection presentations

Dorothy Iannone – 6th floor

Robert Filliou – ground floor

Ongoing from 19:00

Fermín Jiménez Landa – Hand the Present (on the façade of M HKA)

I You Me We Us (INBOX – 5th floor)

Collection presentations Iannone & Filliou

Performance schedule

19:00–19:50 – Stef van Looveren, OPUS II – In Situ space (starting in the library)

20:00–20:30 – Juan Domínguez, El brindis – toast in the library

20:30–21:00

Raquel Gualtero, 360° – Round Room (ground floor)

Alejandra Pombo Su, Undercurrent Honey – 2nd floor (Pauline Curnier Jardin exhibition)

20:30–late – Carlos Monleón, Many Suns: one-night bar – auditorium
(limited capacity, registration at the door)

21:00–late – Laura Llaneli, Happy b-day ASAP (As Slow As Possible) – library

21:00–22:00 – Anna Reutinger, Hats for Communal Celebration – Pauline Curnier Jardin exhibition

21:00–late – DJ set by María Pandiello – M HKAFE

22:00–22:30

Raquel Gualtero, 360° – Round Room (ground floor)

Alejandra Pombo Su, Undercurrent Honey – Pauline Curnier Jardin exhibition

22:30 – Cake ceremony by Anea Lyvv Dreisz + Gift ceremony
(for everyone whose birthday is on 17 January)

Performances & artists

Anea Lyvv Dreisz – Empire of Light / Imperio de la Luz (Art’s Birthday cake & poem)
Inspired by a dreamlike vision, Empire of Light references a painting by René Magritte, Alejandro Jodorowsky’s The Holy Mountain and Thomas Mann’s reflections on philosophy and elevation. A “mountain” of Swiss meringue becomes both cloud and sky, capturing the tension between darkness and light. Finished with “eternal sun rays”, the cake refers to Philip Glass’s Hymn to the Sun and the sun as a symbol of rebirth. Created in the spirit of Robert Filliou’s “Permanent Celebration”, the cake honours the collective nature of the artistic community, recognising each person as part of its brightness. As visitors move through the evening’s performances and reach the top floor of M HKA, they encounter this luminous mountain cake – a personal Empire of Light. Sharing it becomes a collective gesture celebrating light over darkness.

Juan Domínguez – El brindis (a toast)
With El brindis, Juan Domínguez brings a toast that is part of his serial project Clean Room, an ongoing series of performances and encounters that takes root differently in each city and context. The toast appears like a sudden shoot: in just a few minutes, a flow of sentences unfolds to celebrate the simple fact that we are still alive, together and now. For many years, Domínguez has explored the political potential of theatre by radically questioning conventions, time and spectatorship.

Raquel Gualtero – 360°
In her solo 360°, Raquel Gualtero returns to her Colombian roots, with rotation as the central movement. She shifts between the playfulness of childhood games, the virtuosity of traditional dances and the exuberant energy of carnival, embodying at once the playing girl, the dancing woman and the searching mother. The result is a physical circle of memory and transformation: a body that looks back, turns, and keeps moving.

Laura Llaneli – Happy b-day ASAP (As Slow As Possible)
Llaneli radically stretches the universal Happy Birthday song by only playing a new note once the previous one has completely faded away. The short, recognisable melody turns into a slow, hovering soundscape in which waiting, resonance and silence take centre stage. The birthday song shifts from an instant ritual to a slow, attentive listening experience that sharpens our sense of time.

Fermín Jiménez Landa – Hand the Present
In Hand the Present, Jiménez Landa transforms the city’s symbol – the hand – into a circulating gift that activates affection, vulnerability, trust and distrust. An apparently simple, edible object moves from hand to hand and pocket to pocket, quietly infiltrating the choreography of the celebration. The work reflects on the act of giving as a movement that does not accumulate possessions but forges temporary, non-commercial relationships.

Carlos Monleón – Many Suns (one-night bar)
In Many Suns, Monleón invites visitors into a temporary bar where liquids, wines and grape broths become a collective, performative tasting. The palate turns into a cave from which we emerge in crystalline light, while a rhythm of sips repeats the unity of the night and the multiplicity of days. Drinking becomes a play of sponges and gravity: we become vessels in which new, fluid grammars of body and environment circulate.

María Pandiello – DJ set
DJ María Pandiello brings an eclectic, club-oriented set in which techno, breakbeat and leftfield electronics flow into each other. With precise build-ups, bold transitions and a sharp sense of atmosphere, she moves effortlessly between experiment and dance floor. Her set provides the pulsing, rhythmic line of the night: an invitation to move, linger and carry the evening into the late hours together.

Anna Reutinger – Hats for Communal Celebration
Reutinger’s participatory performance revolves around birthday hats as tools for collective celebration. Where individual birthday parties were historically often reserved for the elite, her hats invite the audience to become “guests of honour” together and to embrace art as something made for and by many. Using second-hand textiles, natural dyes and social encounters, she shows how craft can become a catalyst for connection, imagination and shared resistance.

Alejandra Pombo Su – Undercurrent Honey
In Undercurrent Honey, Alejandra Pombo Su explores the voice as an animal, vibrating body that detaches from a recognisable person. She breaks the fixed link between voice and identity and opens up a field somewhere between autofiction, post-human transformation and extraterrestrial presence. The performance creates intense, often visceral experiences that destabilise the boundary between being and appearing.

Stef van Looveren – OPUS II
The performance OPUS II opens Stef van Looveren’s new In Situ exhibition and forms the first chapter of the work. Instead of a ready-made installation, you witness how performers, in a ritualised procession, carry, activate and assemble objects into a spatial and symbolic framework. With sound-producing forms, silvered surfaces, shifting light and bodies in motion, Van Looveren explores cycles of transformation and queerness, in which identities dissolve, rearrange and re-emerge.