Beige

Rue Coppens 3, 1000 Brussels / 06.06-12.07.2025

In cooler air holds the smoke together, Anna van der Ploeg invites us into a space where language takes shape, not just as meaning, but as movement, form, and weight. The exhibition unfolds as an extended meditation on the physicality of speech and the porous boundaries between self and collective, sense and suggestion. Here, language is not a fixed structure but a drifting body — inhaled, fractured, passed from hand to hand.

Van der Ploeg’s practice draws on linguistic theory, particularly the idea that language is not only spoken but embodied. Her sculptures echo this philosophy, referencing idiomatic expressions and communal utterances that carry social, political and economic histories. Working at the intersection of concept-driven art and a kind of embodied material poetics, she offers objects that behave like sentences: layered, elusive, charged with the residue of shared meaning.

Some of the works in the exhibition take up the motif of the hand, the mouth, and forms inspired by the sphericon; a mathematically continuous object that never stops moving. These shapes function as metaphors for idioms, which themselves slip across time and culture, never quite belonging to one person or place. Influenced by her background in printmaking and painting, van der Ploeg crafts these forms with the precision of a sentence carved into breath. What results is a kind of quiet, tactile semiotics, where sculpture holds the memory of speech.

The exhibition also features one woodblock of a series, drawn from the visual language of grassroots poster communication in Johannesburg. These works speak to the fragile architecture of community and the aesthetics of informal authorship. They carry echoes of vernacular forms, yet remain firmly situated in a contemporary South African context, where visibility, voice and access are still actively contested.

While her methods are grounded in studio-based labour, van der Ploeg’s attention is always turned outward, toward the shifting ground of public life. Her use of multiplex plywood, a material both utilitarian and stubbornly poetic, reflects her interest in contradiction. It is cut and layered, coaxed into shapes that hover between sculpture and painting, between legibility and metaphor. Through this process, she does not seek perfection but understanding; of the way things come apart and come together again, sometimes unevenly.

The exhibition’s title suggests something provisional and fragile: a condition held in balance, suspended rather than fixed. In this way, cooler air holds the smoke together gestures toward a poetics of containment that is not about closure, but about proximity. It is the coolness of air, not the will of the flame, that allows the smoke to hold. In a similar spirit, van der Ploeg’s work resists resolution, instead lingering in the spaces where expression falters, where the body remembers what the voice cannot say.

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Anna van der Ploeg (1992, Cape Town) is an interdisciplinary artist from South Africa whose work spans sculpture, painting, printmaking and writing. She engages with the social life of language and the material conditions of expression, with a particular focus on how community, identity and authorship are negotiated through form. Her perspective is shaped by the context of post-apartheid South Africa, a place where narrative is both a personal inheritance and a national task. She holds a BA in Fine Art (Hons) from the University of Cape Town and a Master’s degree from KASK, Ghent, where she received the Leu de Legaat Award. Van der Ploeg has exhibited internationally, with solo presentations in Cape Town, Johannesburg, Brussels, Leuven, Melbourne and New York. Recent residencies include Museum M in Leuven, SAFFCA in Brussels and Reservoir Projects in Cape Town. She lives and works in Brussels.