Courtisane 2026 — a subjective review of the festival

As stated on their website, “Courtisane is a platform for film and audiovisual arts. Through a yearly festival, film screenings, talks and publications, we research the relations between image and world, aesthetics and politics, experiment and engagement.” This summary is more than accurate for the festival, which celebrates its twenty-fifth edition this year, and where I had the chance to spend three days exploring a variety of films and moving-image works.

In different locations across the city of Ghent, the beginning of April became a period of learning, unlearning, inspiration and enthusiasm — amid and in direct relation to the ongoing chaos of the world. Several works also discussed genocide, war, migration, exile and displacement from a cinematic point of view. This year’s theme was about the notion of home and how everyone perceives it differently, depending on class, race, gender, upbringing, family history and so on.

Courtisane unfolded over five days with a rich, well-curated program, ranging from local emerging artists to returning guests and acclaimed international artists, such as British avant-garde filmmaker John Smith. Its various sections and thematic chapters were curated by different programmers, artists, and curators, which were, in many cases, part of their ongoing doctoral research programs, resulting in a heterogeneous festival catering to a diversity of interests, from 1990s feminist video works to Sudanese cinema and lecture performances.

The festival functioned as a gathering and a meeting point: both virtually, on-screen and among the audience. I noticed that there is a wide geographical scope, as well as a broad range of media, styles, genres, and experiences. It was refreshing to see both the works of young, upcoming artists and those of established ones, many of whom attended the festival and took part in artist talks and roundtable discussions.

​As suggested in the title of this essay, my writing will be based on my subjective selection and personal viewing experience— I decided to watch films mostly from the short film programs, so this way, I was able to get to know more artists. My focus will be on the largest sections, Undercurrents, as well as the program titled The World I Left Will Not Leave Me and Measures of Distance, which all shared several recurring motifs and characteristics. 

The right to rest, the right to our bodies

The opening section Undercurrents 1 was titled Rest Assured, curated by Belgian artist Marthe Peters. The program was a great combination of older classics and more recent moving-image works, all reflecting on the questions of rest, relaxation, laziness, pause, and burnout.

How did we understand the relationship between work and leisure twenty to thirty years ago, and how do we understand it now? Is it possible to get out of the capitalist hamster wheel and truly relax, or is this only a privilege for a few? How can we create situations, events, and circumstances that make us feel less overwhelmed? How are burnout, anxiety and the precariousness of the art world interconnected?

These were the questions which the films tackled, often in a poetic or surrealist, metaphorical manner. It was great to see Chantal Akerman’s ironic video (Portrait of a Lazy Woman) from 1986 about being “lazy”, in which she tries to do “nothing”: she gets up, walks around in her apartment while smoking a cigarette and listens to another woman playing the cello. Is she happy or is she bored while doing all this? The film made me contemplate how we understand these notions today and how important it is to try to avoid labelling ourselves lazy when we need to rest and relax.

Certain works were also focusing on kinship and on non-human beings, such as cats, whose sense of time and understanding of relaxation is something we can all learn from — seen, for example, in Chris Marker‘s short etude about his cat, Guillaume-en-Egypte, who is casually chilling on the piano, listening to his favorite, Ravel (Cat Listening to Music, 1988).

A highlight for me was the film by the section’s curator, Marthe Peters, titled Henry is a Girl who Likes to Sleep. Taking the relationship with her cat, Henry, as a starting point, Peters’ work is a deeply personal, almost confessional film about how to find our place in the world, what self-care means, how can we (and should) practice it, and what are the ways that we can relate to other beings who might not be so different from us. Parallels between the cat’s behaviour and the author’s fatigue, slowness, withdrawal, and following our own needs were presented through humour and empathy, while the film’s visual language was also rich, combining different techniques, like animation and analogue film.

I perceived Lisa Steele’s 1974 work, Birthday Suit – with scars and defects, as a powerful performance in which the artist, “celebrating” her 27th birthday, documents and narrates all the scars on her body. Moving from childhood accidents to teenage games, we slowly arrive at the last scar on the artist’s body — left by breast cancer surgery from earlier that same year. Minimalist and intimate in form, yet striking in its narrative tension, the piece can be understood as a bridge to another section of Undercurrents, titled Wise Women – Much Madness is Divinest Sense, curated by artists and filmmaker Rebecca Jane Arthur (part of the elephy collective).^[1]

This program continued to address questions about the female body, the (mis)representation of women, the deconstruction of stereotypical images of them, as well as subversive and experimental positions in feminist filmmaking practices. As the curator of the screening summarized: “many of the works resist narrative coherence through silence, repetition, and sonic disruption. They reclaim the body as a tool and site for performance, abstraction, storytelling and symbolism and ask the viewer to listen differently — to movement, breath, texture, and rhythm.”^[2]

Presenting pioneer feminist artists from the 1980s and 1990s — mostly from the United Kingdom — alongside a selection of contemporary works, created a strong homage to a period when video art first began to gain importance. Martine Thoquenne’s Hysteria (1982) takes as its starting point the violence of the medical gaze and draws inspiration from Georges Didi-Huberman’s book, Invention of Hysteria: Charcot and the Photographic Iconography of the Salpétriére. Fragments of archival photographs and texts recall the story of one of the patients, Louise Augustine Gleizes, and are interwoven with Thoquenne’s performance, in which her head and face appear, evoking various gestures and grimaces, all made in stop-motion.

This tense rhythm and frustration are present in her later Catholic Guilt (1986), in which, during a hypnotic, trance-like four minutes, the iconography of female catholic saints is juxtaposed to mundane and subversive erotic symbols. Set in an abandoned cathedral, Thoquenne — recalling the writings of Annie Ernaux’s reflection on her Catholic upbringing — emphasizes how religious ideology inscribes itself on women’s bodies, and how difficult it is to break free of it.

A much slower, meditative rhythm is present in Alia Syed’s Durga (1986), a silent film shot on 16 mm inspired by the Hindu goddess of both generative and destructive forces. As the artist quotes from the Hindu tantric texts: “‘I am, out of me all things originate, into me all are withdrawn.”^[3] The black-and-white film plays with recurring images of the body — especially of the abdomen — evoking notions around birth, cyclicality, and transgenerational trauma. Without a linear narrative, the artist uses shadows, layered imagery and dissolving scenes, creating a work that unfolds as a slow meditation on the phases of life and women’s role within them.

A particular scene which stayed with me was repeated several times throughout the film. Shot from the top of a stairwell looking down, it shows a white bedsheet being thrown downwards. The sheet has a ghostly presence, somehow evoking the previous and current inhabitants of the building, as well as the owners of the bedsheet: the women who washed and tended it, and those who lay beneath it. Through this image, the film gestures toward invisible forms of labor — housework, care work, and motherhood — that quietly underpin everyday life.

Following the notions of cyclicality and life phases, Vicky Smith’s 2024 film is a recent work in the artist’s extensive oeuvre. Her film Shedding focuses on the ageing body, presenting multiple superimposed layers of herself on a hand-processed black-and-white film. Repeating a simple gesture — rotating her head from left to right — Smith creates a beautiful interplay of layers, shifting in and out of focus, leaving traces that appear as a spectral image, like the bedsheet in Syed’s film.

Another work which played with the genre of portraiture — with an ironic twist — was Cathy Sisler’s Aberrant Motion #1 (1993). The Canadian artist appears in the film as the “Spinning Woman”, a character who spins around in the city: in parking lots or on the main road, creating tension, disturbing the locals’ commute. Talking about what is considered a “normal” body and behaviour for women, the video is a confessional piece about not belonging, feeling different, and developing various coping mechanisms — such as the alter ego of the Spinning Woman — to overcome the difficulties. The action of spinning becomes a metaphor of both disruption (of normativity) and resistance against the everyday forms of oppression. Using a lo-fi, documentary style with a sense of humour, Sisler’s work could be seen as an early example of early queer and crip discourse in contemporary art.

​(Be)Longing

The program The World I Left Will Not Leave Me, curated by Kristofer Woods,^[4] offered insights into artistic practices addressing race, class, migration, and questions of home and belonging. The first section I saw presented films such as Larry Achiampong’s The Expulsion (2018), which highlighted the invisible community of East London workers who remain unseen from the majority’s point of view. He documented the labour of cleaners, janitors, porters, and bouncers—all with migrant backgrounds. As the artist summarizes, these gestures are “transmuting the common acts of cleaning and maintenance into something that has the power of the rituals of prayer or a sequence of launch codes”.^[5]

While Achiampong talks about a community from a distance, in a documentary style, Max Göran‘s approach is more personal: returning from Berlin to her father’s hometown in Sweden. The title of the film, “filming dad’s ass while he’s chopping log with his chainsaw”  (2018) already alludes to a more ironic tone, in which the artist attempts to initiate a conversation with her dad about his job as a physical worker (a lumberjack), as well as broader questions of masculinity, gender, and class. Working as an artist in Berlin, Göran tried to create a connection with him; yet while it seems what motivated her was to address these uncomfortable issues about cultural capital, physical versus artistic labour, the rise of right-wing populism within the working class — her father just laughed without really taking these attempts seriously.

As a result, his awkward laughter, jokes and silences — as well as the way he performs in front of Göran’s shaky handicam with extravagant zooms and perspectives — talk about these questions in an indirect, subtle way.

Another section addressed these questions related to belonging in a more disturbing way, emphasizing the shadow side of what home can mean by thematizing transgenerational trauma and abusive (family) relations. The title of Vika Kirchenbauer’s film could have been the title for the entire screening program: The Capacity for Adequate Anger (2021) explores questions about a lonely childhood, feeling othered and marginalized, and the return to such a place, which could no longer really be understood as home.

These experiences — shown through childhood drawings, family photos, anime snippets and mobile photos by the artist — are juxtaposed with the recollection of Kirchenbauer’s first institutional solo exhibition. The film unfolds as a poetic self-reflection on upward mobility in the field of contemporary art, addressing questions of cultural capital, self-representation, and precarious working conditions, narrated amid personal visual recollections. 

Andrea Luka Zimmerman‘s essay film (While the Gods Were Busy with Another Child (2026) explicitly recounts her withdrawal from both of her parents since she became thirty. Through archival materials recorded on 16 mm film, VHS and family photographs, she retells her childhood in 1970’s working-class Munich, her abusive mother and the way she left that toxic environment and became a filmmaker in the UK. The result is a deeply personal, intimate and unsettling movie about the necessity of sometimes breaking ties, drawing boundaries, and trying to understand the background of another person, while acknowledging the impossibility of returning to the site of trauma.

All the films mentioned above by Göran, Kirchenbauer and Zimmerman are characterized by a certain queer resilience that the artists had to develop to overcome oppression and homophobia in their place of origin.

Kumail Syed’s film (Les enfants ont des oreilles, 2026) also tackled the question of returning once we have left a place for good. After reading Didier Eribon’s novel Returning to Reims, the artist decided to face his working-class background and his upbringing in Brussels’ Marolles district. As written in the booklet, up to that point, he had denied his background, and in the non-linear, associative structure, we encounter the people who influenced his journey toward such a return.^[6]

Finally, we meet the artist’s mother, originally from Poland, who reads aloud a letter written to his son, remembering their life when he was a child—the struggles, difficulties and the constant moving from one place to another. She writes in French phonetically, highlighting her working-class and migrant background. Slowly, we can sense a certain kind of empathy emerging from Syed’s perspective, which encompasses the whole film.

Letters Home

The letter format connects The World I Left section with the films of the last screening I saw,Measures of Distance 6. It started with Mona Hatoum’s emblematic video from 1988 (Measures of Distance) in which the artist, who was born to Palestinian parents and grew up in Beirut, reads out loud the letter her mother wrote to her. In 1975, the artist was unable to return from London to Lebanon due to the civil war. In the film, the images taken by Hatoum of her mother in the shower—a very personal and intimate setting—are being literally “overwritten” by the letters in Arabic, creating an opaque visual world, full of layers, different meanings and attempts to understand each other.

As we hear the letters from mother to daughter translated into English and read by the artist, it is heartbreaking to realize that nothing much has changed in the Middle East since the mid-1970’s in terms of war, genocide and people forced to live in exile. This deeply personal early piece by Hatoum has been exhibited worldwide in biennales and exhibitions; however, experiencing it in a cinema added a special dimension.

Hatoum’s film served as a great starting point for all the other films in the section, especially Niko Wei’s Maman (2025), the artist’s graduation film. It is a visually minimalistic yet deeply moving short film about the relationship between mother and son, the urge to understand one’s origins and the attempt to create a portrait of someone. The film also consists of a letter, one which Wei wrote to his mother, asking about her childhood, her move from Likasi (Kongo) to Brussels and her unfulfilled dream of becoming a photographer.

With an emphatic, emancipatory gesture, the letter is presented as a voice-over read by the mother, blurring roles and responsibilities, emotions and desires, visions and viewpoints. After a brief scene in which we see her, the film consists of a single extended shot capturing a sunset — something that was the dream of Wei’s mother to both document and relive. It is finally coming true, and they are collaborating on it together. As we hear the letter and watch the sun setting on the horizon, the life of a woman, whose story was never told before, unfolds, while contemplating one’s origins, belonging and finding one’s home. Wei addresses all these questions across generations and the possibility/impossibility of speaking and telling one’s story with a minimalist yet precise style and visual confidence.

Courtisane made a lasting impression on me — even though it was impossible to see everything. Not only the exciting selections, the well-curated programs and the many artists who were invited to engage in dialogue with their films​ made this festival special, but also the warmth and openness which I encountered there, as a foreigner myself. Will definitely go back next year.

---

^[1] Curated by Rebecca Jane Arthur, in the context of the research project Homeward Bound — Her Memoir on Binds and Becoming (KASK & Conservatory / School of Arts Gent) In collaboration with Elephy.

^[2] https://www.courtisane.be/en/event/undercurrents-10-wise-women-much-madness-divinest-sense

^[3] https://lux.org.uk/work/durga-a-ritual/

^[4]Curated by Kristofer Woods in the context of the research project Mis-Shapes: Class and Moving-Image Production (KASK & Conservatory / School of Arts Gent).

^[5]https://www.courtisane.be/en/event/expulsion-video-story-filming-dads-ass-while-hes-chopping-logs-his-chainsaw-la-memoria

^[6]​​https://www.courtisane.be/en/event/capacity-adequate-anger-while-gods-were-busy-another-child-les-enfants-ont-des-oreilles

Cover image: A panel discussion with between Andrea Luka Zimmerman, Kumail Syed, Max Göran, Rhayne Vermette, Vartan Avakian, Vika Kirchenbauer (the filmmakers in the program The World I Left Will Not Leave Me) and curator Kristofer Woods. Photo: Michiel Devijver, courtesy of Courtisane Festival)