— Hangar is closed from Sunday, December 22 (inclusive) to Thursday, January 23

24 January - 15 June 2025

AIMAGINE - Photography and generative images

Just one year ago, the idea for this exhibition seemed both bold and unsettling. Delving into the world of artificial intelligence to explore its intersections with photography—a discipline we have championed for nine years at Hangar—could have been seen as a rupture, even a betrayal. However, it was a necessity, almost a mission: to meet the challenge of a dialogue between tradition and innovation, and to explore the future of the image.
To build this project, we adopted a hybrid methodology: an international call for projects, allowing fresh ideas to reach us, combined with a rigorous selection of works discovered during our research. We quickly chose a structuring theme: revisiting historical events or figures through the lens of artificial intelligence. This framework allowed us to avoid purely aesthetic abstraction and focus the reflection on the dialogue between the past and the future.
Supported by experts in photography and image, the Hangar curation team approached this selection with increasing confidence. The chosen artists stand out for their deep reflection on their practice, reinterpreted in light of this new tool, regardless of their generation. These works do not merely present photorealistic images: they embody a new visual category yet to be named, a new generation of creation that could be called, why not, promptography.
With this exhibition, Hangar reaffirms its identity: an art center resolutely focused on photography and image, but also firmly rooted in the heart of contemporary art history’s transformations.
Welcome to a journey between the real and the virtual, the past and the future, where imagination is written at the intersection of humanity and machine.
- Delphine Dumont, director of Hangar

15 November - 21 December 2024

APPARITIONS

After participating in the Paris Photo and Approche fairs, Hangar Gallery opens its first group show in Brussels.
These 9 photographers explore the boundaries of the medium and the materiality of the print, blurring the line of the viewer interpretation. Apparitions, disappearances.…. what do these images reveal about our contemporary world and our relationship with the image?

13 September - 21 December 2024

ATELIER

Stephan Vanfleteren

Thanks to this major exhibition by the renowned Belgian photographer at Hangar, we find beautiful classic photography. Atelier – Stephan Vanfleteren reveals the talent of a master of light and chiaroscuro.
Stephan Vanfleteren resembles all the works brought together in this Atelier exhibition: without embellishment, falsely casual, dark in appearance but with a silent radiance... The Workshop is him. It’s his inspiration, his look, his talent, his emotion, that’s what he gives. He gives us today at the Hangar the opportunity to get to know him. He lifts the veil. When you enter its lair, you have to lift a heavy veil. Like a thick red velvet theater curtain. Except it’s gray. And in a natural material. We enter the stage; his workshop has the size and shape of a theater stage; the light of the sun falls on its model like show lighting: backlit, laterally, from a low angle... The cry of the seagulls – the North Sea is not far away – reinforces the dramaturgical touch of the The place, which was in turn a dying house, a bank, a sports hall.
Still-life, portraits, and nudes photography
Stephan Vanfleteren wanted to compile all of his work carried out in the intimacy of this workshop in a book: ATELIER was born in November 2023, 1.6kg of paper which brings together 12 years of creation... It is a body of work including the singularity, when we have this opportunity to look at them all together, bears the characteristics of its aesthetics: obsession with light, search for the “magic moment”, depth of gray levels, theme of life and death ... From the cheerleaders of the first shoot, to the dead animals of the last shots, ATELIER sweeps across a slice of an artist’s life, made up of inspiring encounters or solitary work...
The power of light in photography
For the scenography, we let ourselves be guided by the narration of the book. Which subtly sweeps through subjects which are so many states of
life: child, adult, living, dead, animals, plants... We move from one to the other, at a rhythm given to us by Stephan’s writing Vanfleteren. He is the director, like in his workshop. With sobriety, he takes us into his world, the workings of which he perfectly masters. Indeed, Stephan Vanfleteren is today a photographer at the pinnacle of his art. But, more than the soul of the artist’s studio, today we perceive at the Hangar, the interiority of the man. The rays of light, omnipresent, transcend the whole.
Are we in a workshop or already in another world?