"Half a century after Galeries du Bailli’s heyday of Conceptualism, WHAT DID YOU PASS ON TO ME “retour au Bailli” returns to this historic Brussels site to reconsider artistic inheritance...

The tautological, performative, and site-specific strategies that shaped Le Bailli’s 1970s legacy serve as a point of departure, but the artists in this exhibition engage this history critically rather than reverently. Where Le Bailli once reflected a largely masculine, Eurocentric perspective, the works in this exhibition both continue and challenge that lineage.

Across sculpture, installation, photography, textile, painting, and sound, the artists adopt and destabilize the formal structures of early Conceptualism. Their practices draw on craft-based, process-oriented methods that also function within feminist and queer frameworks. They confront the exclusions embedded in traditional art histories, emphasize the performative potential of the body, and dissolve rigid distinctions between painting and sculpture into fluid, biomorphic, and associative forms. Site-specificity, architecture, language, and digital media also play central roles throughout the exhibition.

While the historical figures of Le Bailli established a canon of intellectual rigor, their work emerged from a particular model of spatial and formal authority. The artists in this exhibition disrupt that legacy both conceptually and aesthetically, deliberately avoiding the detached atmosphere often associated with Conceptual art. This exhibition is fuller, louder, and more tactile. Through fabrics, thread, digital technologies, structural interventions, and domestic materials, the artists replace the cool distance of early Conceptualism with embodied, active participation. In doing so, they suggest that inheritance gains meaning not only through preservation, but through revision and reinvention." -excerpt from exhibition text.

curated by Frederick Gordts, Giulia Blasig, Charlotte Norwood, and Nicole O’Rourke.