04/06/2026
11-06 OPENING Things to see and forget about in Belgium - WOUT DE RIDDER's series of medium format film photographs inhabits that same territory. Travelling across Belgium, he turns his lens toward the incidental — objects and places so familiar they have become invisible. None of them are necessarily unique to the country. And yet, gathered together, they accumulate into something unmistakably Belgian. Not a postcard. Not a monument. Something harder to name, and more honest.
These photographs are shown in dialogue with a second body of work: a selection of anonymous amateur images drawn from TinyGallery's own archive. Taken by unknown hands, they document the quiet daily life of a Flemish family across four decades — from the 1920s to the 1960s. Birthdays and Sundays. Gardens and interiors. Faces looking directly into a camera held by someone who loved them. Unstaged and unguarded, these images were never meant to be art. That is precisely what makes them so compelling.
Placed alongside Wout De Ridder's contemporary work, they create an unexpected conversation across time. The objects change. The light changes. But something persists — a certain way of inhabiting the world, modest and particular, that is difficult to define and impossible to mistake.
That persistence, perhaps, is Belgitude.
