Jester proudly presents it will come from below, a duo exhibition by Ada Van Hoorebeke (°1982, BE) and Junghun Kim (°1991, SK). it will come from below resonates with the layered histories of the former mining site, where traces of the industrial past remain materially and symbolically embedded in the environment. The nearby slag heap, which is visible from the exhibition space, acts as the geographic and conceptual anchor point, approaching the landscape as a body, and in turn, the body as a landscape. Viewing this landmark as both a scar and seedbed, it will come from below questions how landscapes metabolize trauma, and how bodies—whether human or non-human— adapt, persist, and heal within altered ecologies.
Junghun Kim’s practice interrogates the profound impact of economic and technological progress on humanitarian concerns. His work operates as an activation system where poetic, spiritual, and speculative gestures expose what is often overlooked by anthropocentric perspectives. When entering the exhibition, Kim presents From the cells of the mother (2023), a performative video work that shows the artist practicing a critical reflection on the extractive development of our planet, with a specific focus on ecological trauma, communities, and emotions. It’s a call to action, a plea to reconsider relationships with the Earth and its inhabitants. At Jester, Kim developed Accumulating dilemmas through extracting planetary cells (2025), a sculptural installation that converses with the excavations practiced on this site, reframing what is seen as resource into living cells of a larger whole. While metaphorically opening up the subterranean tunnels that still run beneath the exhibition space, the work unearths a large machine-like form that fractures into hybrid morphologies: limbs, bones, and botanical structures merge into a body that gestures toward the healing of what lies below.
Ada Van Hoorebeke creates fabrics and installations involving the growing and processing of dye plants. Her practice can be read as a living laboratory, embracing nature’s complexity and resilience through transformation. As a first gesture in the exhibition space, Van Hoorebeke presents Future Ey3 Fabric (2023), a textile work she refers to as a universe that is bendable, foldable, and stretchable. This work shows drawings made with natural dyes, depicting a speculative language of beings that might arrive after humans are long gone. For it will come from below, she developed Madder Routines (2025), a work that frames the madder plant—historically coveted for the alizarin red pigment in its roots—as its protagonist. A new generation of this species has been propagated and now populates the Jester site, while an older generation has left a delicate imprint of its underground networks on textile.
Works by Kim and Van Hoorebeke activate dye plants, ceramics, sculptural devices, textile works, and performance-based video, tracing connections between metabolic processes, planetary care, extraction politics and embodied resilience.
The exhibition space itself is presented as a living body that breathes and pulses, and where cycles of regeneration are made tangible. Writer Susan Griffin’s reflection that “the body is a landscape” acts as a conceptual lens through which care, decay, and regeneration are reconsidered. Rather than presenting the industrial past of this site as a closed chapter, the exhibition listens to its reverberations, suggesting that what lies below still pulses with life.
