M HKA.
Art’s Birthday

Join the M HKA in celebrating the 1,000,063rd birthday of art! An evening full of performances, activities, music, drinks, and cake, held as part of EUROPALIA ESPAÑA. Free admission — everyone is welcome.

Art’s Birthday 2026 – celebrate the 1,000,063rd birthday of art
Saturday 17.01.2026 – 7 PM – 1 AM, M HKA, Antwerp

On 17 January, art blows out its 1,000,063rd candle again at M HKA. With performances, sound, symbolic gestures and ritual moments, the museum becomes a playful, slightly anarchic ceremonial space for one night. Art’s Birthday, conceived by Fluxus artist Robert Filliou, is a worldwide network of celebrations in which art is seen as a continuous, collective gift — born again each time we share it. This edition, in collaboration with EUROPALIA ESPAÑA, is curated by Joanna Zielinska, Javi Cruz & Katleen Van Langendonck. Artists and “Ushers” guide you through the building: from intimate performances to bar rituals, from birthday hats to a glowing cake. Look for them in the museum, let yourself be carried along, and celebrate with us that we can still look, listen, dance and toast together.

Programme

Exhibitions open – 7 PM – 11 PM

INBOX exhibition I You Me We Us, 5th floor
Featuring works by Laura Palau, Alex Reynolds, Margaret Salmon, Andrea Zavala Folache & Adriano Wilfert Jensen.
Collection presentation Dorothy Iannone, 6th floor
Collection presentation Robert Filliou, ground floor

Ongoing from 8 PM
Fermín Jiménez Landa – Hand the Present (dispersed amid the guests and projected onto the façade of M HKA)

Performance schedule

Performances & artists

Annea Lyvv Dreisz – Empire of Light / Imperio de la Luz (Art’s Birthday cake & poem)
Inspired by a dreamlike vision, Empire of Light references a painting by René Magritte, Alejandro Jodorowsky’s The Holy Mountain and Thomas Mann’s reflections on philosophy and elevation. A “mountain” of Swiss meringue becomes both cloud and sky, capturing the tension between darkness and light. Finished with “eternal sun rays”, the cake refers to Philip Glass’s Hymn to the Sun and the sun as a symbol of rebirth. Created in the spirit of Robert Filliou’s “Permanent Celebration”, the cake honours the collective nature of the artistic community, recognising each person as part of its brightness. As visitors move through the evening’s performances and reach the top floor of M HKA, they encounter this luminous mountain cake – a personal Empire of Light. Sharing it becomes a collective gesture celebrating light over darkness.

Juan Domínguez – El brindis (a toast)
With El brindis, Juan Domínguez brings a toast that is part of his serial project Clean Room, an ongoing series of performances and encounters that takes root differently in each city and context. The toast appears like a sudden shoot: in just a few minutes, a flow of sentences unfolds to celebrate the simple fact that we are still alive, together and now. For many years, Domínguez has explored the political potential of theatre by radically questioning conventions, time and spectatorship.

Raquel Gualtero – 360°
In her solo 360°, Raquel Gualtero returns to her Colombian roots, with rotation as the central movement. She shifts between the playfulness of childhood games, the virtuosity of traditional dances and the exuberant energy of carnival, embodying at once the playing girl, the dancing woman and the searching mother. The result is a physical circle of memory and transformation: a body that looks back, turns, and keeps moving.

Laura Llaneli – Happy b-day ASAP (As Slow As Possible)
Llaneli radically stretches the universal Happy Birthday song by only playing a new note once the previous one has completely faded away. The short, recognisable melody turns into a slow, hovering soundscape in which waiting, resonance and silence take centre stage. The birthday song shifts from an instant ritual to a slow, attentive listening experience that sharpens our sense of time.

Fermín Jiménez Landa – Hand the Present
In Hand the Present, Jiménez Landa transforms the city’s symbol – the hand – into a circulating gift that activates affection, vulnerability, trust and distrust. An apparently simple, edible object moves from hand to hand and pocket to pocket, quietly infiltrating the choreography of the celebration. The work reflects on the act of giving as a movement that does not accumulate possessions but forges temporary, non-commercial relationships.

Carlos Monleón – Many Suns (one-night bar)
In Many Suns, Monleón invites visitors into a temporary bar where liquids, wines and grape broths become a collective, performative tasting. The palate turns into a cave from which we emerge in crystalline light, while a rhythm of sips repeats the unity of the night and the multiplicity of days. Drinking becomes a play of sponges and gravity: we become vessels in which new, fluid grammars of body and environment circulate.

María Pandiello – DJ set
DJ María Pandiello brings an eclectic, club-oriented set in which techno, breakbeat and leftfield electronics flow into each other. With precise build-ups, bold transitions and a sharp sense of atmosphere, she moves effortlessly between experiment and dance floor. Her set provides the pulsing, rhythmic line of the night: an invitation to move, linger and carry the evening into the late hours together.

Anna Reutinger – Hats for Communal Celebration
Reutinger’s participatory performance revolves around birthday hats as tools for collective celebration. Where individual birthday parties were historically often reserved for the elite, her hats invite the audience to become “guests of honour” together and to embrace art as something made for and by many. Using second-hand textiles, natural dyes and social encounters, she shows how craft can become a catalyst for connection, imagination and shared resistance.

Alejandra Pombo Su – Undercurrent Honey
In Undercurrent Honey, Alejandra Pombo Su explores the voice as an animal, vibrating body that detaches from a recognisable person. She breaks the fixed link between voice and identity and opens up a field somewhere between autofiction, post-human transformation and extraterrestrial presence. The performance creates intense, often visceral experiences that destabilise the boundary between being and appearing.

Stef Van Looveren – OPUS II
The performance OPUS II opens Stef Van Looveren’s new In Situ exhibition and forms the first chapter of the work. Instead of a ready-made installation, you witness how performers, in a ritualised procession, carry, activate and assemble objects into a spatial and symbolic framework. With sound-producing forms, silvered surfaces, shifting light and bodies in motion, Van Looveren explores cycles of transformation and queerness, in which identities dissolve, rearrange and re-emerge.

M HKA collection

Dorothy Iannone – Extase (1970)
Extase is a collaboration between Dorothy Iannone and Robert Filliou, combining Iannone’s sensual drawings with a song by Filliou. The publication embodies Iannone’s fascination with ecstasy, love, female desire and spiritual unity, and her belief that ecstasy need not be exceptional but can become part of everyday life. Her highly personal, erotic visual language made her a key figure within the feminist avant-garde and an important reference for contemporary artists.

Robert Filliou – Research in Arts and Astrology (1972)
In Research in Arts and Astrology, Filliou arranges the birth dates of friends, historical figures and even divine characters according to the signs of the zodiac. He suggests connections between the everyday and the spiritual, the intimate and the cosmic, underscored by personal notes. The work reflects Filliou’s playful approach to art as a network of relationships, chance and ideas – the same spirit in which he invented Art’s Birthday.

INBOX exhibition – I You Me We Us
16.01 – 22.02.2026 – 5th floor

I You Me We Us is part of Art’s Birthday 2026 and brings together three Spain-born artists based in Belgium — Alex Reynolds, Laura Palau and Andrea Zavala Folache (in collaboration with Adriano Wilfert Jensen) — with a work from the M HKA collection by Margaret Salmon. The exhibition presents three video works and one book that form a kind of family within a shared, vulnerable present. Through domestic rituals, caring gestures and intergenerational knowledge, the works reflect on birth, legacy, community and transformation.

Laura Palau – Llevar les angines a través de tres generacions (2022)
Palau weaves together rural knowledge and family history in a ritual where grandmother, mother and daughter rub their wrists with homemade olive oil to soothe a sore throat. The video reveals how care practices, bodies and generations are intertwined in a circle. From this kind of intimate action, Palau reflects on climate, community and the tension between rural and urban life.

Alex Reynolds – Peel (2022)
In a single, static shot, two hands peel an orange together, as if animating a Baroque still life. The tactile, almost erotic choreography between fingers and fruit makes tangible how relationships and affection are negotiated through small gestures. Reynolds uses the language of film to unsettle conventions and make us look differently at proximity, touch and play.

Andrea Zavala Folache & Adriano Wilfert Jensen – sex & place vol. 1–4, preliminaries
Zavala Folache and Wilfert Jensen explore collective, score-based writing as a way to articulate shared concerns about intimacy, childcare and (a)sexuality. Working from the concept of “Domestic Anarchism”, they ask how forms of solidarity can stretch beyond conventional ideas of family. Their practice engages dance, co-living and care as intertwined tools for both artistic production and everyday life.

Practical information

Location: M HKA – Museum of Contemporary Art Antwerp, Leuvenstraat 32, 2000 Antwerp
Date: Saturday 17 January 2026
Time: 7 PM – 1 AM (exhibitions open until 11 PM)
Admission: Free, everyone welcome
In collaboration with M HKA

Come wander, listen, taste, dance and celebrate together that art — like Art’s Birthday itself — comes into being again and again each time we share it.