For this edition of Art Brussels, Newchild presents Listen As Soil, a group exhibition that reflects on the quiet, transformative act of gathering, absorbing, and metabolizing experience — much like the silent, continuous labor of the earth beneath us. The exhibition borrows its title from the metaphor of soil as a vessel of memory, holding layers of history, emotion, and possibility.
To “listen as soil” suggests a form of attention that is patient, porous, and receptive — a way of holding complexity without immediate resolution. Across the practices of the seven participating artists, this idea unfolds through explorations of folklore, ecological fragility, material memory, and human experience.
Anousha Payne’s sculptures and paintings draw on Tamil folklore and her dual Irish and Indian heritage, transforming natural materials into hybrid figures that evoke metamorphosis, animism, and the porous boundary between the human and non-human worlds. Similarly attentive to the natural environment, Madeleine Bialke’s luminous, post-apocalyptic landscapes address ecological precarity, offering hopeful visions of connection and care in the face of environmental collapse.
Dalton Gata’s surreal compositions weave together elements of Caribbean heritage, art history, and pop culture. His figures — vibrant, embodied, and theatrical — reclaim and reimagine archetypes of beauty, queerness, and fantasy. This engagement with symbolic characters finds resonance in Viktor Mattsson’s surrealist paintings, where devils, cowboys, and clowns grapple with tenderness, violence, and existential struggle. Both artists channel the instability and ambiguity of cultural archetypes to reflect the contradictions of desire, melancholy, and human vulnerability.
Kristian Touborg and Yoo Geun-Taek share a material methodology rooted in the layering and accumulation of visual impressions. Touborg’s digitally-inflected collages and tactile surfaces blur the line between technology and craft, while Yoo’s paintings, composed through repetitive gestures in ink, hanji paper, and oyster shell powder, evoke a meditative process of sedimentation. Both practices explore how memory, image, and matter become entangled over time, revealing the unseen strata beneath contemporary experience.
Ella McVeigh’s abstract paintings and drawings extend this inquiry inward. Through a process of visual decision-making rooted in found imagery, her works unfold like sedimented layers of thought and sensation, resisting fixed meaning.
Together, the artists in Listen As Soil invite us to consider how observation, memory, and transformation accumulate quietly over time — how art, like soil, listens without haste, holding space for histories, contradictions, and new growth.
