Bloodstained, pockmarked, resurrected: THE GET's inaugural exhibition in Ghent

THE GET, a mutli-purpose exhibition space created by Belgian architect, Glenn Sestig, opened its doors to the public of Ghent, Belgium, for the first time this June. The space is almost spartan, with bare walls, exposed beams and concrete floors creating a blank canvas to accommodate the vision of the artists, designers and architects who will come to occupy it. To inaugurate the space, THE GET presents La Rencontre du Troisième Type (Close Encounter of the Third Kind), a group exhibition featuring works by Belgian artist Bernard T. Sestig and the artistic duo Middernacht & Alexander. The exhibition’s title riffs on the title of the American science fiction film Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) directed by Steven Spielberg. In referencing the iconic UFO film, curator Fabian Jean Villanueva directs our attention to the alien sculptures which fill the space—familiar objects reconstituted by the artists into sculptural artefacts that are visceral and raw, their imperfections foregrounding their materiality.

There is always a delicate balance between interest and blankness when creating an exhibition space—a space that inspires and converses with a wide variety of works without competing with them. THE GET’s strength in this regard is highlighted in conversations between STIR and the featured artists. Bernard T. Sestig spoke about working with the space, saying, “I’ve always been interested in creating a dialogue between my work and the spaces it inhabits. At THE GET, the architecture, the light and the sculptures don’t compete, they reveal one another.” Middernacht & Alexander, whose work engages with the timelines of objects and spaces, echoed this sentiment, saying, “The grid of columns immediately made the space feel like a sacral hybrid of a holy temple and a brutalist shelter. We wanted to engage with its solemn weight and find friction points where our work could disrupt its clean, commanding rhythm.”

Benches which straddle the line between organic and geometric, furniture and sculpture, appear to drip with coagulated blood. Stools and shelves with a similar finish give the room a foreboding look, the familiarity of the forms making their strangeness even sharper. In the centre of the space, a large cylinder commands attention. From one angle, it appears to be an oil drum, normal, other than the layers of corrosion, epoxy and pigments that create the appearance of caked-on blood. In walking to the front of the piece, however, the sculpture reveals itself to be hollow, missing one side and collapsing in on itself, furling with what look like the effects of heat and disuse.

This is the work of Middernacht & Alexander, a duo of contemporary artists and furniture designers (amongst other things), composed of Belgian artist Sofie Middernacht and Dutch artist Maarten Alexander. The duo is focused on the material, psychological and existential layers of everyday life, themes they bring out by resurrecting forgotten, found objects and giving them a second life as sculptural furniture. These pieces are indelibly marked by the contamination, burial and abandonment of their past lives, making them unique even before the artists apply their own transformations. The exhibition includes pieces from their acclaimed, ongoing series How I got over, which takes old, recovered oil tanks as the basis for unique pieces of functional art. These are sourced from Belgium, where homes were once powered by the diesel stored in these now decommissioned underground tanks.

Under the hands of Middernacht & Alexander, the leftover traces of rust, diesel, tar and soil are not imperfections, but fingerprints. The value of the works lies in the craftsmanship and layering of artistic materials, but also in the story of the object written onto its physical form by time. The pieces recall uncomfortable ideas and images—decay, death, blood, viscera. Rather than sanding these down to create something more palatable, the duo carefully preserves and enhances these aspects, foregrounding the cycle of life, the effects of time and a disturbing side of the much used term, ‘materiality’. Speaking about the encounters between their works and the contemporary space, they told STIR, “Our work acts like corrupted time capsules of high gloss and decay. We aren’t fighting these pristine walls, we’re just introducing them to their own future.”

Brussels-based curator Fabian Jean Villanueva, who works across contemporary art, design and fashion, adds this inaugural exhibition at THE GET to a resume that includes collaborations with MoMA, Hauser & Wirth, The Andy Warhol Foundation, Avant Arte, THE SKATEROOM and Rosewood Hotels. To complement Middernacht & Alexander’s ‘bloodstained’ designs, Villanueva selects abstract works by Bernard T. Sestig.

Shapes made of polyurethane made to look like something between compressed foam and concrete are held up by simple industrial poles. The surfaces of these shapes—grey, red, small, large, rectangular, circular—are pockmarked and cratered, dripping with white and rust-coloured paint in segments that seem to fold in on themselves. In the centre of the room, an amorphous, unidentifiable object with this same appearance is strapped to a wooden frame, with chains, threads and tree roots emerging from it in a franken-creation of manmade and natural objects. Through these immediate, vividly tactile works, Sestig seeks to uncover the violence and the threat of total environmental crisis that lurks beneath the more agreeable surface of contemporary culture.

The uncomfortable affect created by Middernacht & Alexander is echoed in these pieces by Sestig, which read alternately as remains from a car crash, decaying concrete or ossifying bedding. The artist, who has previously worked in fashion, painting, sculpture, scenography and architecture described his practice, saying, “I don’t see my work as an expression of decay, but of transformation. I’m interested in how material records time, and how sculpture and architecture reveal one another.”

The exhibition is a collision of architecture, art and design that reimagines what sculpture can do, what furniture can look like and the extremes of how designed objects can make their spectator feel. The weight and drama of the encounters between the pieces and the space itself are a strong start to THE GET’s programme, complementing the multivalent practice of its architect and creator, who is as comfortable designing buildings and objects for commercial, residential, retail and corporate uses, as he is creating designs grounded in an emotional, refined understanding of spatiality and material.

La Rencontre du Troisième Type will be on view until July 17, 2026 at THE GET in Ghent, Belgium