The best places to visit during Antwerp Art Weekend 2021 in Antwerp

This art centre keeps moving. It started in 2004 in a condemned building out at the docks. Then it relocated to an abandoned laundry in the south. Now it has recently settled into a former convent and reopened its doors in May 2021 with three exciting projects: Radically Naive / Naively Radical and Periphery, two group exhibitions and Watermarks, silent traces by Michèle Magema.

Founded in a town house in Het Zuid, Zeno X gallery now occupies a converted industrial space in the edgy Borgerhout neighbourhood. Run by Frank Demaegd, it currently exhibits works by well-known painter Luc Tuymans. Don't miss out on Pélagie Gbaguidi's Naked Writings for which she investigated the archives of the Royal Museum for Central Africa. The title refers to the importance of un-learning, of shedding prior beliefs and consequently decolonizing the mind.

At M HKA, the Museum of Contemporary Art Antwerp, you can visit Thirty Plumbers in The Belly by Jumana Manna at the museum's IN SITU space. This space offers a place for new artworks and experimental practices by significant early- and mid-career artists from around the world. In this exhibition, the artist considers improvisational infrastructures in places where infrastructures are built to fail. Until 29 August 2021. Free admission during Antwerp Art Weekend. 

The daughter of an Antwerp gallery owner, Sofie van de Velde knows the contemporary art scene intimately. Her second gallery occupies a large white interior in the emerging Nieuw Zuid neighbourhood. Here she exhibits her pick of international artists along with young Antwerp artists. Currently, you can visit BEND, STRETCH, RELAX by Stef Driesen and Leon Vranken.

Gallery owner Roger Szmulewicz devotes his striking white exhibition space to Belgian and international photography. Ranked as one of the ten best photo galleries in the world, it exhibits classic American photographers as well as contemporary European, Japanese and African photographers. Currently, in the exhibition Capturing Life you can enjoy a surprising pairing of two master photographers Vivian Maier and  Stephan Vanfleteren. 

Formerly based in a small town house, Tim van Laere moved in 2019 into a striking new gallery in the Nieuw Zuid district. Designed by OFFICE Kersten Geers David Van Severen, the gallery is a brutal concrete building set next to the river with two gallery rooms lit by soft northern light. During Antwerp Art Weekend you can enjoy the second solo exhibition of Friedrich Kunath, titled New Ballads.