The Best Untold Stories of Brussels Art Week

Peter Lindbergh’s off-camera moments, vanished Japanese worlds and an avant-garde 70s hotbed resurrected – highlights from Brussels Art Week

A cosmopolitan city where young artists can still afford to live and create, Brussels is “surrounded by big sisters such as London and Paris but brimming with a creative energy that is ferocious”, say Laure Decock and Evelyn Simons, founders of RendezVous Brussels Art Week, an annual celebration of the city’s art scene. This year, more than 100 venues, from members’ clubs to repurposed warehouses to artist-run spaces opened their doors for a packed programme of talks, workshops, screenings, live music and performances. Here’s our pick of three shows that unearthed some lesser told stories.

Lost and Found: Japanese Photography at the A Foundation, until 20 December

After the 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami, photographer Takahashi Munemasa began painstakingly salvaging, washing and cataloguing thousands of family snapshots pulled from the mud and ruins of Yamamoto City, matching and reuniting them with their owners. The most waterlogged and unidentifiable were consigned to a “hopeless box” that today makes up the first room of the exhibition Lost and Found – a warped “wall of ghosts” consisting of 1,600 photographs and a haunting visualisation of memory, loss and resilience. From there, this time capsule of an exhibition moves on to spotlight the overlooked perspectives of 15 Japanese photographers – many of them women – ranging from Shibuya Noriko’s documenting of the explosive takenoko-zoku movement, teenagers who brought their boomboxes and neon clothing to the streets of Harajuku in the early 1980s, to Takanashi Yutaka’s nocturnal series exploring the alleyways and tiny Shinjuku bars patchworked with posters around Golden-Gai Street. Yutaka photographed in the early hours when the last customers had disappeared and before the graffitied walls and frayed seating were lost to redevelopment. Staged in a former industrial building in the Forest district of Brussels, it’s a rarely seen perspective on the complexities of Japanese society, through the lens of catastrophe and memory.

Peter Lindbergh, Hors-Champs, at The Merode, until 31 December 2026

“I’ve never been impressed by somebody who came in with a crocodile bag, you know?” said the late Peter Lindbergh, the German photographer who worked his way from a sheep farm in Duisberg to upending the bombastic era of the supermodels by putting them all in white T-shirts. Winding its way through the rooms, passageways and candlelit corners of the Merode, a hôtel particulier in the heart of Brussels, Hors-Champs (“Off Camera”), co-curated by Lindbergh’s son Benjamin, showcases 55 works by the photographer that move beyond his fashion and celebrity portraiture. Printed on uncoated white paper, unframed and nailed directly to the wall, they span decades and include windswept French coastlines, steely industrial wastelands, and a melancholic love letter to Berlin. The famous Lindbergh muses are present too – Kristen McMenamy in early 90s New York, Tina Turner in mid-90s LA, Nadja Auermann in 2000s Paris – but they appear in the unguarded, sideways moments that didn’t show up on magazine covers, Lindbergh’s lens no less eloquent in capturing the essence of a human encounter.

Once We Existed by Pieter Laurens Mol & Laía Argüelles Folch at Chiquita Room, until 7 November 2026 

For a handful of feverish years in the early 1970s, Brussel’s shopping arcade Galerie Bailli Louise in the southern stretch of the city, transformed into a haven for Belgium’s radical art scene. The city was undergoing “Brusselisation” at the time, as corporate skyscrapers shot up haphazardly and unregulated amid historic neighbourhoods; a collection of avant-garde galleries rebelled by repurposing the arcade’s conventional retail spaces, filling their glass cases and window displays with works and performances by homegrown artists such as Marcel Broodthaers and international names – Vito Acconci, Dan Graham, On Kawara, Dan Flavin and Sol LeWitt among them. By 1975, the galleries had largely moved on and the arcade has lain dormant until this spring, when an exhibition was staged looking back at the wild, wayward legacy of the space and its 70s happenings. This week, it is once again a fixture on the Brussels art scene, heralded by Spanish gallerist Laura Gonzalez Palacios, whose Barcelona-based Chiquita Room has opened a new Brussels space under its roof. Inaugural show Once We Existed makes for a resonant return to the area’s roots, joining two generations – veteran conceptual artist of eccentric physical relics Pieter Laurens Mol and Spanish artist Laía Argüelles Folch, who uses discarded vintage photographs and forgotten flea market postcards to reactivate traces of the past. Together they explore memory, transient spaces and the architecture of time, mirroring the arcade’s own resurrection after decades of slumber.

RendezVouz runs every September as an annual celebration of Brussels’ art scene