Finissage
IKOB – Feminist Art Prize 2025
On the last day of the IKOB – Feminist Art Prize 2025 exhibition, you are warmly invited to join us for a special afternoon programme, including a performance by Myrthe van der Mark, a conversation between Herlinde Raeman and Lara Gasparotto and guided tours with curator Brenda Guesnet.
Don’t miss the final opportunity to discover the works of the eleven nominated artists: Catherina Cramer, Cordula Ditz, Magdalena Frauenberg, Bethan Hughes, Myrthe van der Mark, Bernice Nauta & G.C. Heemskerk, Herlinde Raeman, Lynne Gbodjrou Kouassi & Nora Heidorn, Sophie Schmidt, Sandra Singh, and Huize You.
Admission is free and we are happy to offer drinks and cake. Everybody welcome!
PROGRAMME SCHEDULE
3-6 pm: Myrthe van der Mark: Yeah? But who? I might know her. Performance, 2024-25. Japanese Slipper; Cocktail Glass, Midori, Cointreau, Lime Juice, Maraschino Cherry, Dry Ice, Misty Stix, variable dimensions; open edition
Work can take many forms, shaped by different environments, tools, skills, goals, and institutions. For the finissage of the IKOB – Feminist Art Prize, Myrthe van der Mark defines “work” as any human activity that contributes to goods or services—paid or unpaid, formal or informal. She focuses on serving staff as an example of a familiar profession, attending to customers by preparing a Japanese Slipper cocktail. The passing of time is evoked through the sublimation of dry ice in the drink, a transformation likened to an exchange between “bodies” and “spirits,” echoing the scientific shift from solid to gas. Price of cocktail edition: €7.40; commissioned by Mu.ZEE & KAAP, Ostend (BE).
3 pm: Guided tour of the exhibition with director Frank-Thorsten Moll (in German)
4 pm: Guided tour of the exhibition with curator Brenda Guesnet (in English)
5 pm: Artist talk on motherhood and artmaking with Herlinde Raeman and Lara Gasparotto (in English)
Departing from Herlinde Raeman's work the mom/artist notebook pt. 1, part of the exhibition of the IKOB – Feminist Art Prize, Raeman is joined by artist Lara Gasparotto for a conversation about the implications of motherhood for artistic practice.
ARTIST BIOGRAPHIES
Myrthe van der Mark exposes personal endeavors with a focus on the way textual elements and visual fragments are integrated into exhibitions and performances. She uses actions and objects to evoke direct, personal associations, thereby emphasizing the context in which the work is shown. She has had solo exhibitions at CC Strombeek, CC Binder in Puurs-Sint-Amands, and at Avee Gallery in Kortrijk (all BE). Her work has been shown at Museum Dhondt-Dhaenens in Deurle (BE), Yokohama Museum of Art (JP), Kunsthal Extra City in Antwerp, 10N Gallery in Brussels, Kunstencentrum STUK in Leuven (all BE), Vleeshal in Middelburg (NL), M HKA in Antwerp, Mu.Zee in Ostend (both BE), and de Brakke Grond in Amsterdam (NL). She is currently part of the programme of Publiek Park 2025 (Meise and Brussels).
Herlinde Raeman uses analog photography to explore the everyday, often collaborating with friends, family, and her child. Her work navigates personal, feminist, and activist themes, such as the relation between motherhood and artistry, time, archives, and familial creativity. Through intimate, shared authorship, she highlights underrepresented contexts and relational strategies of creation. Her graduation project, the mom/artist notebook, pt. 1, was selected for the photo book Opus One ‘23 (Breedbeeld) and exhibited at cultuurcentrum Hasselt (BE) in 2024. The series also appeared in a book available at Confituur bookstores and the FOMU shop.
Lara Gasparotto is a Belgian photographer known for her poetic, intimate visual language. Active for over a decade and represented by Stieglitz 19 in Antwerp, she creates evocative images that blend everyday reality with dreamlike atmospheres. Her work captures fleeting moments—portraits of friends, landscapes, and domestic scenes—that feel both deeply personal and universally resonant. With a cinematic eye and painterly sensitivity, Gasparotto constructs narratives that explore identity, memory, and emotion, often working with people from her own life. Her photographs resist linear storytelling, instead embracing the spontaneous and the symbolic, the constructed and the accidental. Melancholy, romanticism, and irony weave through her work, inviting viewers to question the boundaries between reality and imagination. Whether shot in Belgium or abroad, her images offer a raw, lyrical perspective on contemporary life, always rooted in a profound care for the gaze and the emotional weight of the instant.