Mirror, Mirror, V2Vingt, Brussels (2021)

Mirror Mirror brought together the works of Younes Baba-Ali and Kristof Van Heeschvelde in an encounter between two distinct artistic languages: video art and painting.
The exhibition sought to open a dialogue between art forms that are often presented in separate contexts, encouraging a friction that can lead to new forms of understanding and perception.

In his video work ‘Daily Wrestling’, Younes Baba-Ali presents a video in which real male and female bodies, voluminous, powerful, and visibly exerted, grapple in a slow, ritualistic struggle. Their physicality, grounded in reality, evokes baroque grandeur and echoes the tension of Rubensian figures, without ever becoming a direct citation.
Kristof Van Heeschvelde, in turn, captures a single image, a frozen moment, which he sculpts through layers of paint, reference, and distortion until it aligns with his own perception of reality. The painter distills, the videast assembles. Both construct fictions from fragments: one through the condensation of a scene, the other through the accumulation and editing of time.Though formally different, painting and video here are two ways of reordering reality.