Fictional Ruins
This exhibition and accompanying publication present six projects by Gijs Van Vaerenbergh, developed over a span of fifteen years. Each project departs from a condition of absence: an architecture that is missing, incomplete, or exists only in memory.
The title Fictional Ruins refers both to the works themselves and to the contexts from which they emerge. Ruins are often perceived as authentic remains of the past, yet they are rarely neutral. Every ruin is shaped by interpretation, selection, and reconstruction. Throughout history, ruins have continuously been rewritten: elements disappear, others are emphasized or deliberately removed, and meanings shift over time. In this sense, ruins are always — to some extent — fictional constructs.
The projects in this exhibition build on that understanding. Some engage with sites where physical remains are still present; others address places where all material traces have vanished and architecture survives only through images, plans, or collective memory.
Each intervention begins with a carefully constructed narrative that is translated into spatial form. These forms adopt characteristics associated with ruins — abstraction, fragmentation, incompleteness — while developing their own distinct formal language. Rather than functioning as literal reconstructions, the works remain deliberately open, inviting visitors to imagine what is absent.
The exhibition presents the projects through scale models (1:50), making their proportions tangible, alongside film images that reveal their relationship to the surrounding environment. Together, they show how each work balances between presence and absence, recognition and estrangement.
As Fictional Ruins, these projects do not simply recall the past; they reveal how the past is continuously constructed, imagined, and reinvented.
DATE
7.06.2026 - 23.06.2026
Thu-Sat 13:00-18:00
LOCATION
Bac Art Lab KULeuven, Leuven (BE)
Free Entrance