Opening: Thursday, August 6, 18:00 – 22:00
Visit Wednesdays through Fridays, 12:00 – 17:00 until September 11, 2026.
For this year’s Pride exhibition at C A S S T L, Yves de Brabander and Cedric Jacquemyn present Absence, Returned.
This exhibition is not a collaboration in the traditional sense, but a meeting between two distinct artistic practices shaped by a shared life and years of continuous exchange. Living and working together has created a quiet dialogue between their work, where ideas, materials and ways of looking naturally overlap.
Absence, Returned suggests that something can return, while acknowledging that it may never return completely. It speaks of what has been lost, hidden or removed, and of the traces that remain.
In E/Motion of a Garment, Jacquemyn works with the garment as a remaining presence after the body has withdrawn. Coats, jackets, canvas works and textile forms suggest a body that has left, or might still return. They are not static objects: moved by air, weather, gravity and time, they continue to respond to the space around them.
De Brabander’s new installation Ancestral Inferno departs from inventories of looted and disappeared cultural heritage. It takes the form of a fictional lost altarpiece, deconstructed into separate panels. The work does not attempt to reconstruct what has been lost. Instead, it presents fragments of a work that never existed, while exploring how images disappear, survive and are remembered.
Together, the works speak about absence through different materials. Garments and images become vessels of memory. Neither attempts to restore what is gone; both suggest that what disappears continues to shape what remains.
Within the context of Pride, Absence, Returned proposes a more complex understanding of identity: not as something fixed or fully present, but as something shaped through proximity, loss, desire, devotion and return.
About the artists
Cedric Jacquemyn is an Antwerp-based fashion designer whose practice combines tailoring, material research, and visual storytelling. Since launching his label in 2011 after graduating from the Royal Academy of Fine Arts Antwerp, he has developed a distinctive body of work shaped by craftsmanship, natural materials, and themes of fragility, protection, and the human condition. Alongside his fashion practice, he teaches fashion design internationally.
Yves de Brabander is an Antwerp-based visual artist and photographer whose work explores themes of identity, vulnerability, absence, and queer experience. Working with photography, collage, and installation, he creates layered works in which classical references meet contemporary questions around memory, censorship, and the body. His practice often blurs the boundaries between documentary, fiction, and material experimentation.
About TOGETHER
Absence, Returned forms part of TOGETHER, a city-wide initiative supporting the LGBTQIA+ community, initiated by Carla Arocha and developed in collaboration with Stéphane Schraenen, Vanessa Van Obberghen, Jesse Siegel, Tom Sanders, Philip Huyghe, Lieven Segers, Luc Tuymans, and Clara Lissens through which a network of Antwerp art spaces unite in the context of Antwerp Pride.
Participating galleries and art spaces: AAIMACHINE, Annie Gentils Gallery, BURO_ASAP, C A S S T L, Kunsthal Extra City, Pizza Gallery, Melis & Piron, Studio Palermo, TICK TACK.