In A Choreographic Exhibition, Polish Canadian artist Ula Sickle reimagines NW as a terrain for performed movements and gestures, scenographic interventions, sound, photographic and video works. After Prologue, which opened in the ground floor gallery in February, A Choreographic Exhibition extends across the entire building over two days (May 3 & 4, 2025) and follows the artist’s research into the live exhibition format. Moving between choreography, performance, and the visual arts, Sickle has developed an internationally recognized practice that explores movement as both a cultural archive and a political act. Her work, presented at major institutions and festivals, interrogates how bodies encode, resist, and transmit ideology. In this live exhibition, she revisits and reconfigures performances created between 2018 and 2024. Expanding on themes of protest, collectivity, and embodied resistance, she activates her performances outside of choreography’s habitual temporal structures.

A Choreographic Exhibition is not a retrospective but a work of sampling, where fragments of past performances—including Free Gestures (2018), Relay (2018), The Sadness (2020-22), Echoic Choir (2021), and Holding Present (2023)—are edited, reassembled, collaged, and set in motion throughout the building. Sickle’s practice does not isolate individual works as discrete entities; instead, they mutate across time, medium, and context, evolving through various stages—from rehearsal to post-production, from sound editing to the internal view of the ‘choreographic camera.’ Rejecting the idea of a singular, authoritative work, Sickle creates an environment where bodies, voices, and images coexist and interrupt one another, inviting heightened awareness and co-presence.

Displacing choreography from the realm of fixed composition and score, the present exhibition puts forth an open framework—one in which bodies, voices, and images resonate unpredictably, slipping between categories and momentarily unsettling the structures they inhabit. Here, choreography is neither a closed circuit nor a predetermined sequence but a process of testing—an experiment in collectivity, a negotiation of resistance, and a recalibration of perception itself.

PRACTICAL INFORMATION
Open for visits on Saturday, May 3, and Sunday, May 4, from 1:00 PM to 6:00 PM.
Tickets: ‘Pay what you can’ via the ticket button or on-site at the reception desk.

WARNING 
Strobe lights are used during this performance.

COLOPHON
Curators: Godart Bakkers and Laura Herman
Performers: Amanda Barrio Charmelo, Sidney Barnes, Ewa Dziarnowska, Jose Funnel, Ashley Ho, Amber Vanluffelen
Technical coordination: Ofer Smilansky
Production: Joëlle Laederach for Outline
Executive production: Emilie Legrand for Outline
With the support of the Flemish Government, the City of Aalst, Friends of NW, Outline