PICMOL, in collaboration with Blackpuffin, present
Bodies
Curated by Anne Wetsi Mpoma & Modou Dieng Yacine
đź“Ť PICMOL
245 Molière Avenue, Brussels
🗓 April 23 — 26, 2026
🎧 Opening: April 23, 6–9 PM
Guest DJ
Bodies is a pop-up exhibition presented at Picmol, marking the fourth year of its Brussels residency program — an initiative dedicated to supporting and amplifying contemporary artists of African descent.
Bringing together artists who have passed through the program, the exhibition offers a snapshot of shared presence and singular expression. While we all inhabit a body, no body is lived, seen, or represented in the same way.
Across drawing, painting, and diverse visual languages, the body emerges not as a fixed image, but as a site of vulnerability, memory, emotion, and relation. The works move beyond representation to explore how a body can be felt, inhabited, and understood.
Bodies opens a space for self-examination and collective reflection, where the figure becomes a way of thinking through presence, interiority, and the conditions under which we inhabit the world.
Pablo Cavalier
Wissem Ben Hassine
Laura A. Kingsley
Catheris Mondombo
Modou Dieng Yacine
Olga Yameogo
Diane Stordiau
World Eclectic Therapy – Sunday, April 26, 11 AM
An immersive session combining ritual, embodiment, and reflection, developed through Anne Wetsi Mpoma’s artistic and curatorial practice.
Participants are invited to slow down, reconnect with the body, and engage with questions of presence, memory, and relation in dialogue with the exhibition.
The session will be followed by a curated Italian–Ivorian brunch and a guided exhibition tour with the curators.
Free upon registration: info@wetsi.gallery
(Registration link coming soon)
Anne Wetsi Mpoma is a Brussels-based curator, writer, and founder of Wetsi Gallery. Her work engages with contemporary art, decolonial thought, and social justice, exploring the intersections between intimacy and politics. Her practice is driven by a central question: how to inhabit the world without alienation.
Modou Dieng Yacine is a visual artist based in Chicago, originally from Senegal. His practice combines painting and photography in hybrid forms that explore identity, materiality, and contemporary life. He is co-founder of Blackpuffin, a curatorial company based in Chicago and has exhibited internationally.
Pablo Cavalier is a painter based in Brussels. Born in Cayenne, French Guiana, to a Guyanese father and a Chilean mother. Initially trained in interior architecture, he later studied in the drawing departments of the Fine Arts schools of Bordeaux and Brussels. Alongside this academic path, he has developed a largely self-taught painting practice that explores themes of Amazonian nature, the human body, and Black identities, with a particular sensitivity to the use of chiaroscuro.
Wissem Ben Hassine. Born in Tunisia, Wissem Ben Hassine graduated from the Higher Institute of Fine Arts in Tunis. He currently lives and works in Paris and has exhibited internationally. Through lines that unfold like shaded constellations, Ben Hassine delves into the depth and complexity of human nature. His practice explores universal themes—childhood, family, motherhood, the future, and the intimate self—creating a body of work that resonates across cultures and experiences. His technique, primarily rooted in the use of India ink, reveals a radical approach to artistic expression, oscillating between brutality, restraint, and subtlety.
Laura A. Kingsley is an American - born Dominican artist based in Switzerland. Drawing on evolutionary biology, deep time, microbiology, and diasporic mythologies, Kingsley’s practice envisions a humanity that recognizes its oneness with nature and transcends hierarchical categories of race and gender. She creates work that resists the notion of separation, both from the natural world and from those historically othered by colonial ideology. She holds an Associate Degree in Fine Arts from Chavón in La Romana, Dominican Republic, a Bachelor of Science from the City University of New York - Hunter College, and a Master in Fine Arts from the California College of the Arts. Kingsley participated in the closing of the 2024 Venice Biennale with her performance "Desblanqueamiento" at the San Trovaso River. Her public art projects have been shown as part of “Sculpture in the City” in London (2021), “Tableau Zurich” (2023) and “Twingi Land Art” in Valais (2024), among others.
Catheris Mondombo Born and based in Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Catheris briefly attended the Academy of Fine Arts in Kinshasa in 2013. After a period away from formal training, he fully recommitted to his artistic practice in 2015. Initially working on canvas, he grew dissatisfied with its limitations and began experimenting with salvaged materials. He ultimately turned to used tarpaulins collected from markets and street vendors across Kinshasa. This unconventional support lends his work a powerful symbolic dimension, echoing the city’s social and economic realities while evoking the broader fragility of the human condition.
Olga Yameogo Born in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso, Olga Yaméogo has lived in Toulouse since 1983. To evoke rather than to represent—this is the guiding impulse behind Yaméogo’s work. Her process unfolds intuitively: beginning with a few sketched lines, she gradually builds her compositions through light, fluid touches that blend and overlap until the subject gently emerges. Drawing inspiration from family, loved ones, and personal encounters, her works go beyond portraiture. They capture something more elusive—an imprint, an aura, a presence. Through the vibration of color, time seems to dissolve, with past, present, and future merging into a single image.
Diane Stordiau (DIAAAne) is a visual artist born in Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of the Congo. She lives and works in Brussels. Working primarily in acrylic and oil painting, her practice unfolds through imagined autobiographical narratives drawn from photographic archives and memory—some real, others fictional. By (re)visiting past lives and deciphering the everyday through a dreamlike lens, DIAAAne traces the contours of a personal mythology while probing the intimate sphere. For the artist, painting is an essential means of grasping the inner workings of both her own life and reality itself—rendering them visible only once they have fully matured.
Founded in 2022 by Eric Haegelsteen, an Africanist by heart and philanthrope PIC/MOL is an artist residency based in uptown Brussels. Dedicated to fostering creativity from Africa and its diaspora, PIC/MOL offers a dynamic space for artists, cultural practitioners, and art professionals to step away from their usual environments and fully immerse themselves in their creative processes.
Located at the corner of Avenue Molière and Rue Edmond Picard, the residency occupies an opulent building designed by Fernand Petit in 1924. Built in a traditionalist style with Art Deco influences, the structure embodies both elegance and historical depth.
The surrounding outdoor spaces have been thoughtfully reimagined by landscape architect Erik Dhont. Through a careful interplay of plants, furniture, and materials, he has enhanced the potential of these intimate areas, transforming them into true extensions of the studio.
modou@blackpuffin.net │ info@wetsi.gallery
https://blackpuffin.co/ │ www.wetsi.gallery