Museumplein 04:
Edith Dekyndt
Shadows from the Walls of Death
September 2025 – February 2026
Since the 1990s, Edith Dekyndt has been creating poetic works in which everyday materials are transformed under the influence of physical, chemical, or biological processes. She records these transformations through video, photography, sound, installations, or performance. For Dekyndt, the process is always more important than the finished object.
In Dekyndt’s work, ecology plays a quiet but vital role. Materials and spaces are constantly in motion, influencing one another. Seemingly minor elements such as light, humidity, or air currents take on great significance in her practice. In this way, she reveals how fragile and dependent we are on the natural world around us. Her work encourages us to look more attentively at our surroundings and to reflect more consciously on our place within a larger ecological whole.
For Museumplein, Dekyndt has developed a series of flags inspired by nineteenth-century wallpaper. At that time, the market was flooded with new synthetic pigments. One of these was ‘Scheele’s Green’, derived from copper–arsenic compounds. For the first time, people could decorate their interiors with an intense, fresh, and remarkably stable green that had previously been impossible to achieve. It quickly became a highly fashionable colour for wallpaper. A green, floral aesthetic was particularly popular in the nineteenth century: in a rapidly urbanising and industrialising society, it evoked a sense of nature, health, and modernity. Within this context, one can also understand the rise of the Ghent Floraliën (from 1808) and the popularity of the city’s Botanical Garden, located near today’s Jan Hoetplein.
The irony, of course, is that this attractive green pigment had a darker side. The arsenic compounds it contained could release toxic fumes or dust, especially in damp spaces, with serious health risks as a result. Yet Scheele’s Green remained in use for decades, precisely because it was both visually spectacular and affordable. The motifs on Dekyndt’s flags are directly taken from Shadows from the Walls of Death (1874), a book compiled by Dr Robert C. Kedzie that collected examples of arsenic-based wallpapers as a warning against their deadly dangers.
By re-using these nineteenth-century motifs, Dekyndt exposes the complexity of our relationship with nature. On the one hand lies our fascination with its beauty and our urge to depict or possess it. On the other lies the destructive impact of our actions on that very same nature. The flags make visible how attraction and danger, admiration and destruction, often exist side by side without us noticing. They operate both as a warning and as an invitation: to pause and consider the fragility of our environment, to reflect on the ecological consequences of our choices, and to take our collective responsibility towards the world around us seriously.
Museumplein is an open invitation for artists to create work that temporarily takes over Jan Hoetplein. This square connects several museums—S.M.A.K., MSK, and GUM—and is deeply rooted in Ghent’s history. On one side, it is framed by the Ghent Botanical Garden, while on the other, it is embraced by Citadel Park. Jan Hoetplein is a unique space full of possibilities.
With these presentations, we imagine what the future could bring and showcase a new series of public artworks. Every five months, Museumplein invites a different artist to create work for the five giant flags in the flower bed in front of S.M.A.K. Each piece engages with the square, the park, the city, and its residents, encouraging us to reflect on the role of art in public space—what it is, and what it could or should be.
