THE SHAPE-SHIFTING WOMAN

In this context, the Art Base gallery presents a new exhibition entitled “The Shape-Shifting Woman”, a subjective narrative by two artists with distinct artistic personalities, exploring the diversity of female experiences, their space of freedom, and their resilience.

On the one hand, Kasia Haber presents a series of imposing graphic works in the style of contemporary illustration, with subtle references to pop art. Her protagonists—carefree, triumphant, or rebellious—radiate sensuality and energy, challenging conventions, rigid norms, and conformism. These works take on a particular significance when they are paired with her delicate ink drawings, which combine a fine, precise line with a poetic and intimate approach to her own home. Minimalist portraits of family members and genre scenes emerge as an uninhibited expression of inner strength and a genuine rejection of constraints.

Suddenly, within this fictional yet entirely conceivable space, another story begins, driven by the intention to create a visual and emotional shock in the viewer.

Indeed, this narrative confronts the work of Txema Muñoz, representing a disruptive element that breaks the apparent stability and profoundly unsettles the existence of our heroines. These works are based on Txema’s long-standing project entitled “Ave Fenix”, which explores the restorative power of fire within his overall artistic practice. The artist presents a selection of photographs born from the mastery of flames that he tames and disciplines, transforming them into a tool for shaping and renewal. Through these photographs, along with a shop-window mannequin, Odile, transformed into a sculpture, he weaves the continuation of the story: that of women who must inevitably undergo a radical transformation, ultimately leading them to embrace a completely new version of themselves. Fire, therefore, does not symbolize definitive destruction, but rather rebirth—the starting point of a spectacular regeneration following a period of crisis or trauma.

Émilie Kuczynska-Vigalondo – exhibition curator

Metamorphic Threshold

Odile – Between Fire and Memory

Transformation is not represented: it is manifested

The project unfolds around a body traversed by physical and symbolic forces. Marked by fire, erosion, and the trace of time, it ceases to be a surface and becomes a territory. The burnt matter does not conceal it; it exposes it from another dimension — as a vulnerable and mutable space sustained by a constant tension between fragility and resistance.

This is not an attempt to fix a stable form, but to inhabit a threshold. Identity emerges as the consequence of an action, of a wound, and of a reconstruction. Each mark refers to a process; each alteration opens a new state.

That threshold has an origin. In First Gesture, the feminine sign inscribed in stone evokes a memory prior to the image. There, gesture does not describe: it inaugurates. To mark the world is to begin to exist within it.

The photographic series Interval of Becoming and Ash Becoming Form unfold this transformation through time. They do not function as linear documentation, but as sequences of intermediate states — fragmentation, contraction, recomposition. The image extends the body beyond its physical presence and renders metamorphosis visible without resolving it.

And when the limit seems to contain it, the body crosses it. In Out of Bounds, the frame ceases to function as a boundary and becomes a point of rupture. The figure no longer adapts to the assigned space: it exceeds it.

Taken together, the project constructs a cartography of female transformation in which origin, combustion,
inscription, and overflow do not appear as isolated episodes, but as moments of a single mutable condition. Rather than a closed narrative, it opens a field of forces in which the body affirms itself as a sensitive territory, traversed by time and by the constant possibility of becoming.

2026 — EXPO at ART-BASE
29 rue des Sables, 1000 Brussels