Mariane Ibrahim taking over 12Antwerp

Mariane Ibrahim announces a two-floor presentation at 12Antwerp during Antwerp Art Weekend (May 14 – 17, 2026). Across the revitalized Art Nouveau building, the gallery presents solo exhibitions by Raphaël Barontini and Slimen Elkamel, alongside a curated selection of works by artists from the program. The presentation will extend past Art Weekend, until May 24, 2026.

 

Timed to coincide with Antwerp Art Weekend, Mariane Ibrahim’s presentation at 12Antwerp is conceived in dialogue with one of Belgium’s most active contemporary art contexts. Bringing together strong institutions across the city and Brussels, Antwerp offers a compelling setting for a project centered on historical memory.

 

The project also builds on an institutional conversation in Belgium around several artists in the gallery’s program. Among these connections are Raphaël Barontini’s presentation at Museum Hof van Busleyden, Mechelen (Knights of the Golden Fleece: A Brilliant Myth Unraveled, 2024); Eva Jospin’s Panorama at Fondation Thalie, Brussels (2023); Amoako Boafo and Ian Mwesiga in When We See Us: A Century of Black Figuration in Painting at BOZAR, Brussels (2025); and Zohra Opoku in The Last Place They Thought Of at Kunsthal Mechelen / De Garage, Mechelen (2024–25) and Face to Face with Monet, The Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, The Netherlands (2025).

 

Situated on Kattendijkdok-Oostkaai 12, 12Antwerp is a building reimagined by AIM Architecture. The structure’s distinctive façade and generous interiors retain the character and detailing of the original architecture while articulating a contemporary spatial experience across two floors.

 

On the building’s ground floor, Slimen Elkamel presents a body of paintings rooted in the oral traditions of rural Tunisia and informed by a sustained writing practice. Working between spoken narrative and painted image, Elkamel treats storytelling as a living substance—mutable, carried through repetition, and shaped by what is remembered, omitted, or transformed over time. His palette and mark-making amplify this sense of transmission: color becomes a register of emotion, and the surface holds a layered temporality in which the personal and the collective remain in close proximity.

 

On the second floor, the gallery presents works by Raphaël Barontini, following his major solo exhibition at Palais de Tokyo (2025). Barontini’s practice brings together painting, costume, and textiles to reconsider representation and the construction of history—shifting attention toward the ways images are authored, performed, and circulated.  His work resonates strongly in Antwerp, as Barontini consciously draws from the visual language of Flemish Baroque painting. Monumentality and theatricality are central to his practice, and the rhetoric of portraiture, constructed through ornamental dress, sumptuous color and material symbolism, is reactivated in his work as a counter-baroque gesture, one centered on the Caribbean and the reclamation of diasporic figures of power.

— Wendy Saunders, co-founder of AIM Architecture & 12

 

A dedicated showroom completes the presentation with works by artists from the gallery’s roster, including Amoako Boafo, Salah Elmur, and Shannon T. Lewis amongst others. Together, these works articulate distinct approaches to portraiture, narrative, and lived experience—foregrounding the complexities of identity, memory, and representation through materially and conceptually precise practices.