Larval Tears

Julie De Kezel Veranda is an artist run space in the center of the European quarter of Brussels, co-produced by Cultuur dienst Etterbeek, VGC and curated by Anna Laganovska.

3D printing by Glenn De Cock, Graphic design by Berk Tuncer and Pictures by Milena Wojhan.

24 September – 11 Oktober 2026
Opening: Thursday 24 September — 6pm

Veranda —@veranda_online
18 Generaal tombeurstraat
/18 Rue Général Tombeur —1040 Etterbeek

introduction:
Larval Tears invites visitors into a world suspended between living ecosystems and digital landscapes. Inspired by Julie’s logic or need of collecting, transformation, and memory, the
exhibition unfolds as an enveloping environment where paintings, found objects, crystals, holograms, and sculptures coexist as fragments of accumulating personal database.

Tags:

Artist : Julie De Kezel @Julie.de.kezel
Curator: Anna Laganovska @samulsu
Location: Veranda @veranda_online
3D Production: Glenn De Cock @glenn_de_cock
Photography: Milena Wojhan @wilena.mojhan
Graphic design: Berk Tuncer @bergvonberk

Dates:

Exhibition on view:  24 September – 11 Oktober 2026 Thursday – Sunday 13:00-18:00

Artist Talk at Veranda:  30 September – 18:00, 18 Generaal tombeurstraat/18 Rue Général Tombeur —1040 Etterbeek

Finissage 11 Oktober 13:00 – 22:00

Biographies:

Julie De Kezel ( b. 1995, Ghent) Based in Brussels, Belgium.
Julie De Kezel is a Belgian artist whose practice explores mythological life forms,
biodiversity, and the relationship between the microcosm and macrocosm. Combining scientific and historical research with 3D sculpture, video, installations and organic materials, she creates poetic worlds where science, art and folklore intersect. Drawing on
sources ranging from medieval manuscripts to contemporary science and popular culture, her work reveals unexpected connections between seemingly disparate forms. Her work is shown in many places including Paris FR, London UK, Graz AU, Munich DE,
Leipzig DE, parts of Belgium BE ( Antwerp, Brussel, Gent, stedelijk museum Aarschot,..), Brno CZ and Bucharest RO. Completed four residences in: On sensing traces, Aub; ZimmerFrei,

Munich; Österreichischer Skulpturenpark, Graz and Philippe Vandenberg Foundation
Brussels.

Anna Laganovska (b. 1996, Latvia) is a curator, researcher and cultural producer based in Antwerp, Belgium.
She studied art history and theory at the Art Academy of Latvia and cultural studies at KU Leuven. She has completed the post-graduate programme in curatorial studies at the Royal
Academy of Fine Arts in Ghent and the course in curating and commissioning public art at the University of Gothenburg. Since 2023, she has been working primarily as an independent curator and regularly contributes curatorial and critical texts to exhibitions and publications. Her recent projects
include Flowers at Room Temperature, the central exhibition of Antwerp Art Weekend at De Studio, Antwerp (2023); Spells and Promises at Creative Factory, Turnhout (2024); Border Buda, a public art project across Machelen, Vilvoorde, and Brussels (2023–2024); Publiek
Park in Ghent (2021), Antwerp (2023), and Brussels (2025), and Anna Malicka’s solo exhibition Pūra Lāde (((pure lady))) at Kim? Contemporary Art Centre in Riga (2025). The exhibition received two nominations at the Annual Art Award of Latvia 2025, Latvia’s principal annual prize for contemporary visual art, with Anna Laganovska receiving the Text
of the Year award for its curatorial text.
Previously, she worked as an assistant curator at Frans Masereel Centrum and has collaborated with various contemporary art institutions in Latvia and Belgium. She currently collaborates with Platform Kunst in Opdracht as a researcher and artistic mediator for public art commissions. In 2026, she is a Young Curators Programme (YCP) fellow at the Belgian Pavilion of the Venice Biennale. Alongside that, she has also been involved in independent
film production as a producer and assistant director. She is a co-founder of Publiek Park, as well as part of Faellowship collective, which engages in communal listening as a form of
study. Since 2022, she has been a board member of NICC, an organisation that bridges the gap between creative practice and policy.

EXHIBITION TEXT:

Julie De Kezel’s practice begins with a simple, almost compulsive gesture: collecting. A shed animal skin, a piece of moss, a mineral, an unknown organism, an image captured under a microscope. Things encountered are picked up and taken home, as if the world were
constantly leaving behind traces that ask to be kept. What first appears as a natural object becomes a token of attention, a way of holding onto an encounter and giving form to
something that might otherwise disappear.

Collecting, here, is less an attempt to archive nature than a way of remembering through matter. Found objects become an external memory system, as well as entrances into further
research: an organism can lead to a piece of folklore, an image to a scientific experiment or a new technique, a memory to a fictional world. Knowledge enriches the experience of efinding, while the found object sends the artist back into research. Her practice moves
continuously between these directions, growing like a rhizome, without a fixed centre or predetermined destination.
Along the way, the sense of scale in her work shifts continually. A patch of moss can grow into an endless forest; a city can shrink into a miniature world. Enlargement, reduction and digital reconstruction allow De Kezel to move between recognition and estrangement,
testing how an object might change when its familiar proportions no longer hold. The miniature paintings placed across the walls of Larval Tears operate according to this logic. Enclosed in tear-shaped silver frames, caves sit beside microorganisms, plants and landscapes. A stove, or a pot suspended over a fire, appears among them too – a quiet
reference to the French crémaillère, the iron hook once used to hang a cooking pot over the hearth, and whose installation came to mark the moment a house was ready to be inhabited.
This merging of the domestic with the foraged recalls Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction, in which she proposes the container, rather than the weapon, as another possible origin for both human technology and storytelling: something made to gather, carry and hold what has been found. Against the heroic narrative of conquest, singular action and linear progress, Le Guin imagines a narrative form built through accumulation, relation and
return. De Kezel brings a similarly feminine mode of attention to the aesthetics of video games and fantasy fiction. Rather than following the hero’s quest towards its conclusion, she
gravitates towards what surrounds it – wandering through landscapes, lingering at their edges, gathering fragments and traces to carry home and fold into her own practice.
The miniature paintings are covered with chandelier crystals. Elsewhere in the exhibition, crystals reappear, catching and refracting the light. A crystal does not simply show what is in front of it: it splits a single view into several, bending light and revealing colours otherwise hidden. In this sense, it becomes an apt figure for De Kezel’s movement between realities –
the collected world passes through a prism and emerges altered on the other side.
De Kezel traces her fascination with video game fantasy worlds back to watching her sister play Forestia in 2005, a point-and-click game in which a forest could be explored through small quests, encounters and acts of collection: endless picking without putting a biotope at
risk, endless walking and looking without disturbing the landscape. What interests her in games is not only their imagery or narrative, but the particular way in which a world becomes
available through possible actions. Nature can be looked at, but also entered, traversed, catalogued and collected. Her relationship to these worlds nevertheless remains ambivalent. Uninterested in much of the stress and violence demanded by gameplay, De Kezel describes herself instead as a kind
of professional spectator. She is drawn to recordings in which players wander for hours through fictional landscapes, sometimes using modifications that prevent hostile entities from attacking. Removed from the imperative to fight or progress, worlds such as Dark Souls,
Kingdom Come: Deliverance or Elden Ring become strange landscape films: places to walk through, observe and gather from with the eyes.
Larval Tears takes its title from an object found in Elden Ring. Consuming a Larval Tear allows a player to undergo “rebirth,” a redistribution of a character’s attributes, allowing an
already established identity to be reconstructed. De Kezel borrows this gesture for her own practice: not to discard the archive she has accumulated, but to subject the collecting impulse itself to another metamorphosis – to learn how to read what has been gathered
differently. At the centre of the exhibition, a folding screen, or paravent, holds larger landscape paintings. On its central panel, a dark, cave-like opening echoes the contours of the small
tear-shaped works surrounding it. Nearby, a bucket gathers another kind of holographic objects, fragments and trinkets of imagination collected from the world De Kezel has been constructing. Across Larval Tears, forms reiterate and return at shifting scales or
materialities, as if remembered imperfectly. A crystal refracts a landscape, a tear becomes a cave, and an insect-sized girl reaches towards a glimmer hidden in the moss.