On January 24, ‘The Sunsets were Purple and Red and Yellow and on Fire’ opens at De Garage, curated by Evelyn Simons.

Evelyn Simons is a Brussels-based curator and writer, and the co-founder of RendezVous – Brussels Art Week together with Laure Decock. She is currently the co-Artistic Director of the upcoming Busan Biennale and is affiliated with Horst Arts & Music. Her projects explore the intersections of art, music, performance, nightlife and fashion through hybrid, often site-specific commissioning. In doing so, she aims to facilitate cross-disciplinary collaboration and artistic experiment. A lot of her work looks at civil disobedience — with a strong interest in subcultures, rave and protest, examining how collective gatherings become sites of resistance, imagination, and alternative world-building.

From 2018 to 2023, she led the art program at Horst Arts & Music, an initiative that brings together contemporary art, architecture, and electronic music on an abandoned military site in the Brussels periphery. Prior to that, she was affiliated with Fondation CAB, a private foundation for Minimal Art in Brussels and Saint-Paul-de-Vence, where she curated several exhibitions and established a residency program.

She is a laureate of the Curate Award by Fondazione Prada & Qatar Museums (2014), which led to her curating Driftwood, or how we surfaced through currents (2017) in Athens, as well as The Never Never, an ongoing modular project consisting of a short film, a marketing campaign, and a traveling exhibition with artist Jeremy Hutchison.

Evelyn has curated exhibitions in Luxembourg, Germany, France, Greece, and Belgium; produced two short films; and developed strategic plans for artistic organizations. She holds an MA in Art History (Ghent University) and a Postgraduate in Curatorial Studies (KASK Ghent). She has been curator-in-residence at Beirut Art Residency (Lebanon, 2015), Villa Lena (Italy, 2022), and is currently at HIAP Helsinki with Frame (Finland, 2024). Evelyn currently oversees several permanent public art commissions for the Flemish Government. She is the co-founder of RendezVous – Brussels Art Week, with its first edition taking place in September 2024.