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Tickets
Miet Warlop
IT NEVER SSST
Tickets
"With all those pavilions, some nations struggle to stand out. Not Belgium." – The New York Times
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Room 3
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Level 3 ≤ 100 db
Performance artist Miet Warlop brings her acclaimed work for the Belgian Pavilion at the 61st Venice Biennale to Kanal, turning the exhibition space into a charged arena in which language and music collide. Words cast in plaster circulate through it – carried along, passed on, swept away and shattered. Musicians interpret these lyrical fragments, which merge to form the emotional score of IT NEVER SSST.
In this whirlwind of a world, words lose their fixed meaning. Scattered across racks along the walls, they seem abandoned and left to the ravages of time – as if they were the remnants of some old karaoke machine, waiting for the breath of a new arrangement.
Through a series of rituals, the performers oscillate between despair and the urge to transcend into something meaningful and more beautiful. Expressive and energetic, they grapple with the constant threat of overload, at times laying bare their breaking points.
During the exhibition, a local sculptor adds a series of wall reliefs. Using the traditional alto-rilievo technique, he moulds fragments of the performance into reliefs, as a classical reinterpretation.
For Miet Warlop, no work is ever truly finished – one artistic wave simply flows into the next. This new creation synthesises two decades of in-depth multidisciplinary work into a turbulent, polyphonic constellation in which music, dance and sculpture clash and chime with theatrical language.
Following a seven-month run in Venice, IT NEVER SSST will have its Belgian premiere at Kanal. The Belgian pavilion is a commission by the Flemish Community and was produced by MORPHO, Irene Wool and Kanal-Centre Pompidou, under the curatorship of Caroline Dumalin.
"A lot of people, in the moment we are living in, might feel like stomping their feet, shouting, crying, and hitting something with a stick. At the Belgium pavilion, that sense of release bursts through the doors." – The Art Newspaper
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© Reinout Hiel, 2026, Belgian Pavilion - Venice Biennale -
© Reinout Hiel, 2026, Belgian Pavilion - Venice Biennale -
© Reinout Hiel, 2026, Belgian Pavilion - Venice Biennale
Credits and bios
- Artist
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- Curator of the Belgian Pavillion in Venice 2026
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- Music
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- Music Production
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- Costumes Design and Production
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- Dramaturgical Consultant
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- Choreographic Consultant
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- Artist’s Assistant creation period
- Sculptural Production
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- Production Assistant creation period
- Production Kanal-Centre Pompidou
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- Graphic design
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- Commissioner - Flemish Minister for Welfare and Poverty Reduction
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- The Friends of the Belgian Pavilion 2026
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