Becoming Otherwise examines the material, social, and cultural dimensions of decay and repair. By inhabiting moments of rupture, Bierich and mountaincutters approach vulnerability as a condition through which new forms of existence can emerge. What happens when the unshakeable begins to falter? When the structures we took for granted — political, social, or even the ground beneath our feet — fall apart?

In this context, language functions as a material in its own right, one that has the capacity to connect, misalign, translate, or reconfigure. The exhibition functions as a site of mutual trust, where the artists have allowed their processes to overlap, deliberately unsettling the boundaries of their respective disciplines.

The title of the exhibition draws from the work of anthropologist and philosopher Elizabeth Povinelli, specifically her concept of ‘The Otherwise.’ For Povinelli, ‘becoming otherwise’ refers to the persistent, often quiet ways that life endures within the cracks of failing systems.

Juli Bierich is a German-Japanese artist based in Antwerp. Her artistic performances explore the ‘In between’ of public and personal spaces, using various mediums, with a focus on wearable pieces. The body is serving as a necessary component to her work and can be regarded as a tool, that leaves and is also left with, traces of these live actions, functioning as a documentary canvas.
Julie Bierich graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp and won the Art Antwerp Graduation Prize in 2024. She exhibited her project Brace, brace, at M HKA in collaboration with Emma Mann.

mountaincutters (b. 1990) is a hybrid identity, an artist’s collective working in Brussels. With a focus on in-situ sculpture, they draw on the connection between human beings and the environments they inhabit. Their steel structures, glass elements, ceramics, fabrics and organic materials, as well as their poems and copper circuits form temporary ecosystems, in which energy is channeled between the human, the organic and the inanimate.
Their work has been presented in solo exhibitions show at Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2023); Meessen Gallery, Brussels (2024); Centre d’Art Neuchatel (2022); La Verrière Fondation Hermes, Brussels (2021); and in group shows in different institutions such as Middelheim Museum, Antwerp, (2021); Kindred Spirit, Lisbon (2024); Kyiv Biennal, Vienna (2023). They are part of collections such as Plateforme 10 — Mudac, Lausanne, Middelheim museum & collection of the Flemish Community, Antwerp, Collection du FRAC PACA, Marseille.

The exhibition is curated by CASTOR, a Brussels-based nomadic platform founded by Karel Op ’t Eynde, Camille Van Meenen, and Daniel De Decker, dedicated to creating connections between artists, institutions, and audiences through collaborative exhibition formats.