Blooming from Ashes
Group exhibition and public programme
Curated by research group Art & Ecology
With contributions by Brandon Ballengée, Fabiola Burgos Labra, Liza Goncharenko, Sina Hensel, Eva-Fiore Kovacovsky, Ligia Poplawska, Delphine Wibaux
14 – 17 May 2026
Part of the Antwerp (Academy) Art Weekend
The Tempel is hosting the exhibition Blooming from Ashes, featuring artworks that address the complex socio-ecological issues we face today.
The exhibition brings together works by Fabiola Burgos Labra, Liza Goncharenko, Sina Hensel, Eva-Fiore Kovacovsky, Ligia Poplawska and Delphine Wibaux, all artists from the Art & Ecology research group, providing insight into their ongoing research projects.
Alongside these works, the American eco-artist Brandon Ballengée will present his installation STYX, a collection of carefully illuminated preserved amphibian specimens malformed by the polluted wetlands they developed in. Balléngee will be in residence through 6 June working on his project Les Fleurs du Mal, developed in collaboration with the Royal Academy of Fine Arts and the University of Antwerp.
Works in the exhibition:
Brandon Ballengée
Brandon Ballengée is a visual artist, biologist and environmental educator based in Louisiana. He creates transdisciplinary artworks inspired from his ecological field and laboratory research on the global decline of animal populations, the extinction of species and how animals adapt and evolve in order to survive.
In collaboration with the Art & Ecology research group of the Royal Academy of Fine Arts and the University of Antwerp, Ballengée developed Les Fleurs du Mal (Flowers of Evil). This collaborative art-science investigation seeks to make visible the invisible nature of harmful industrial contaminants found in our everyday local environments and inside of ourselves at a biological level. Such industrial contaminants do not break down naturally, creating problems that will continue for generations, and amplifying their long-term risks to both the environment and public health.
The project focusses on three types of these hidden pollutants – heavy metals, polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) and plastics – through a series of participatory science investigations, the creation of a new body of artworks, publications, and public events. Ballengée is in residence at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts and visiting artist-science in the Biology Department and Fellow of the EcoSphere Group at the University of Antwerp.
Fabiola Burgos Labra
Chirriu Chirriu is a sculpture that expands Fabiola Burgos Labra’s ongoing series of knitted fruits and vegetables, in which gestures of preservation coexist with gradual processes of growth and decay. This work focuses on fiber dyeing and is inspired by the method of braiding a bunch of onions for preservation throughout the winter. The dyeing process occurs at the intersection of red onions, yellow onions, and cotton. The materials self-construct, exchange fluids, and dye surfaces that seem to come from the future or the past, like ancient mummifications.
Fabiola Burgos Labra frequently works with textiles and found precarious materials, creating sculptures, performative scores, and objects that prioritize the ephemeral and tactile over the permanent and visual. Through her work, she reflects on the boundaries between nature and culture imposed by modernity. Her current research project at the Academy, Reweaving Ourselves, seeks to reconnect the weaver with their material and challenge the dichotomy between time and production in industrialized societies.
Liza Goncharenko
Liza Goncharenko is a Ukrainian architect, artist, and researcher based in Brussels whose practice explores landscapes shaped by war, ecology, and memory. Working primarily through pencil drawing and embroidery, she traces how soils, plants, and infrastructures record violence and recovery over time. Her work combines spatial research with slow, material techniques to imagine forms of ecological repair and care in damaged landscapes.
Tracing the Unseen (2025-2026) is a series of drawings and a collective embroidered map of Ukraine. The map, produced with 20 students of the Academy and the UAntwerp during the International Design Workshop Week (2026), visualizes biodiversity, endangered species, and shifting frontlines through stitched patterns. Alongside this, pencil drawings focus on mapping forest fires, flora and fauna, and post-fire regeneration. The works translate ecological and territorial data into visual and tactile forms, revealing processes of destruction and recovery.
Sina Hensel
Sina Hensel is a visual artist and researcher with a special focus on critical colour practices which include the kaleidoscopic transformations caused by the current and future chemical make-ups of landscapes and environments.
At the Temple, Sina Hensel shows the work Oranges Soaked in Heating Sunsets (2025). Blood oranges deepen into their crimson-purple through the pigments anthocyanins, a response to the meeting of warm days and cold nights, the fragile balance of climate. Those oranges soaked in sunsets tell the story of their attunement to surrounding conditions. In the exhibition, they emerge as charred, almost dystopian black blood oranges poured from clay as echoes of what intensified heat practices inscribe upon matter. Some are glazed with ash from anthocyanin-rich leaves, gathered in Josaphat Park in Brussels, which is another quiet trace of how plants shift and endure under changing conditions.
Eva-Fiore Kovacovsky and Sina Hensel
In the context of this exhibition, Eva-Fiore Kovacovsky and Sina Hensel are collaborating on Tasting Photosynthesis From Altered Grounds (Wild Ice Cream Shop) (2026).
Eating from your hands after picking a plant from the ground gives it a particular intensity of flavour – the taste carries the memory of gathering. As if something extra is added in that moment. On a walk through the forest, a few leaves of wood sorrel can hold the sharp, juicy joy of sourness. Can such experiences bring us closer to understanding the complex process of photosynthesis? How can it become tangible? This work of tasting photosynthesis by Eva-Fiore Kovacovsky unfolds further through Sina Hensel’s research into the pigments of purple anthocyanins and orange carotenes that quietly assist in light’s work. They act as subtle shields for the organism, a living sunscreen.
Kovacovsky and Hensel wander and forage together along the polluted edges of the Schelde river in Antwerp, gathering what persists. In considering humans as perhaps the only species to knowingly poison the soil that sustains it, they invite the visitor to taste these altered grounds.
Ligia Poplawska
Ligia Popławska is a visual artist, photographer, and researcher based in Antwerp, with a background in art history. Working at the intersection of art and ecology, her practice explores natural processes and phenomena that often remain unseen.
Invasive Species (2025) is part of her ongoing research project, Whispers of the Primeval Forest (2024–ongoing), developed within the Art & Ecology research group. The project explores forest spirituality and the interconnected life of the Białowieża Primeval Forest – Europe’s last and best-preserved ancient forests – located on the Polish–Belarusian border.
Invasive Species focuses on the spread of non-native plants appearing specifically in the border zone. These species are a direct consequence of military presence and the migration crisis, emerging along the recently constructed border fence – a 180-kilometre-long, 5-metre-high barrier that cuts through the forest and its protected area, causing habitat fragmentation for bigger mammals. Carried by wind or unintentionally transported on shoes and vehicles, the seeds take root in disturbed ground. Their presence signals a subtle yet significant ecological shift, raising questions about how human conflict reshapes even the most protected landscapes, and whether these changes mark a threat or an extension of the forest’s ongoing evolution.
The project is developed with scientists from Bialowieża Geobotanical Station, University of Warsaw.
Delphine Wibaux
Delphine Wibaux is a visual artist based between Marseille and Antwerp for this two-year research project. She is interested in the traces left by different forms of life, between sky and water, and in her interaction through various gestures, with the environment she is exploring.
Delphine proposes a stage of her ongoing research concerning the spatio-temporal imprint of the sun and that of fish recorded in their otoliths – a limestone deposit, biological record of their lives. She is working from two resource sites in Marseille and Antwerp, where she is interested in the soil, water quality, fish, and sunlight as a force prerequisite for the development of life. She tries to capture solar imprints in these two countries, to pay attention to the space, on our impact, to piece together a cohesive whole from fragmented memories, to give a voice in her fiction writing to those who cannot speak as we humans do.
Her proposal is a first step, which takes here the form of an installation, like a pulse taken from the temperature of these two space-times, through sculpture, image, and text. The writing project in progress is revealed inside of the space, in English, in the form of a booklet in her installation, and outside on the right of the Tempel, with a reading and performance in French that you can hear at the time of the high tides on the Scheldt:
Thu 14 May, 14:50
Fri 15 May, 15:33
Sat 16 May, 16:15
Sun 17 May, 17:00
(image: A moment and observation resulting from collective exploration during the Articulate 2025, photo by Delphine Wibaux)