Alicja Kwade: Dusty Die: M Leuven, Leuven, Belgium

What if the unknown is not a boundary, but a starting point? In her first solo exhibition in Belgium, Alicja Kwade invites us to see the world – and our attempts to understand it – differently. She departs from scientific and philosophical and translates them into sculptures and installations that challenge gravity, time and matter.

Alicja Kwade is internationally recognized for her sculptures and installations that challenge scientific and philosophical concepts. She translates ideas about time, chance, and gravity into works that undermine those very systems. Kwade tests our perception and dismantles its boundaries through mirroring, repetition and the deconstruction of everyday objects and natural materials. In so doing, she reveals the fault line between what we think we know and what eludes our understanding.

In her work, reality is turned upside down. Boulders appear weightless, mirrors offer glimpses of parallel realities, and time loses its direction. Using materials such as metal, glass, ancient rocks and petrified wood, she constructs environments that are at once familiar and alienating – spaces where fixed meanings dissolve and perception itself begins to shift.

For Kwade, science is not a conclusive system but a subjective construction – a temporary attempt to impose order on something that ultimately remains unknowable. Her work makes tangible the idea that it is precisely in not knowing that the imagination begins.

At M, the artist presents a selection of key works from her recent practice, complemented by new installations specially created for the museum.

Curator: Eva Wittocx