Expo (UN)SHAME
- 18 October 2025 4 January 2026
(UN)SHAME makes space for what we like to leave in the dark such as feelings that are too raw, bodies that diverge from the familiar, truths too heavy for polite conversation.
Here, shame is named, unmasked and kindly asked to relinquish its place.
What happens when we bring the unspeakable into the light?
What do our silences say, and what’s the cost of hiding?
What happens when we bring the unspeakable into the light — not to expose, but to understand, heal, resist?
Four artists explore the layers and ambiguities of shame — not as a finished result, but as an open-ended process. You’ll encounter the unspoken and the uncomfortable, the unfiltered and the intimate, vulnerable and defiant.
With Hanne Lamon, Giulia Cauti, Ugo Woatzi & Loïs Soleil.
On view from 18 October 2025 until 4 January 2026 at GUM & Botanical Garden.
Vulva Obscura
For a long time, the vulva remained scientifically understudied. The body part is heavily shrouded in taboo, to the extent that its labia folds are referred to as ‘shame lips’ across many languages, including Dutch. Gynecological research has only started to really understand how genitalia such as the vulva, clitoris, and vagina really function in the past few decades, exposing vast healthcare inequalities.
By capturing one hundred people with vulvas, Belgian photographer Hanne Lamon’s Vulva Obscura lifts the veil of what usually remains hidden. Some photographs are taken through a self-made camera obscura system: a precursor to the photographic camera, the light shines through a small hole in a closed shoebox to create a vulva ‘portrait’. Others are taken with a Polaroid camera, reflecting and celebrating the vulva’s typically unseen diversity. Through this process, many people shared their stories of vulva shame with Hanne, which she decided to collect and share to try and destigmatize the vulva.
Viva la vulva!
Hanne Lamon
For two decades, Hanne Lamon (°1982) has been crafting tranquil yet unruly photographs that capture the fragile poetry of everyday life. Her imagery balances intuition and rationality, speed and stillness, intimacy and abstraction. Whether through film photography, delicate printing processes or carefully chosen papers, Lamon creates a tactile, artisanal beauty that feels both deeply personal and universally resonant. Her works emerge from moments of struggle, loss and hope, yet what they reveal is a timeless sensibility — photographs that conceal as much as they disclose, inviting viewers into a world that is at once intimate and connective.
Herbe Folle / Chameleon
Herbe Folle
The French title Herbe folle refers to wild plants that grow wherever they can — often unwanted, often thriving. But folle also evokes a reclaimed queer slur, gesturing toward femininity, flamboyance, and deviance from norms. Woatzi draws on this double meaning to question how power operates: socially, scientifically, colonially. By linking plant life to queer identity, the work resists hierarchies that frame certain bodies, species or behaviours as unnatural or out of place. Instead, it offers space for multiplicity — and for new rituals of collective recognition.
Chameleon
In queer communities, ‘chameleoning’ refers to the adaptive act of blending in — shifting one’s expression to align with dominant norms as a form of self-protection. Under rigid social expectations and taboos, visibility can carry risk, making strategic invisibility a survival tool. Yet this erasure often comes at the cost of authenticity, silencing identities and cultivating feelings of shame.
Ugo Woatzi
Ugo Woatzi is a visual artist whose work moves between photography, video and installation. Through a queer lens, Woatzi explores visibility, intimacy and resilience, often blurring the boundaries between vulnerability and strength. Their practice draws on collaboration and performance, creating images that are at once personal and political. With a sensitivity for both the body and its surroundings, Woatzi constructs spaces where multiplicity can thrive.
Bedroom Culture / Je Me Souviens
Bedroom Culture
The concept of ‘bedroom culture’, first explored by cultural theorist Angela McRobbie and sociologist Jenny Garber in their seminal 1976 essay Girls and Subcultures, describes how, for many teenage girls, the private bedroom is a site of cultural and social expression. Unlike boys, who often find community and identity in public spaces, girls are more confined to the domestic sphere due to gender norms, parental expectations, and safety concerns. The bedroom becomes a space where girls express identity and engage with youth culture on their own terms — through fashion, music, magazines, and conversations. This underscores a spatial inequality, as girls’ participation in youth culture is often limited to what happens indoors, in contrast to boys’ freedoms in public arenas.
Je Me Souviens
Je Me Souviens sheds light on the patriarchal violence embedded in women’s daily lives that is too often hushed, hidden, or ignored. Through fragmented images and memory traces, Löis Soleil bears witness to a sober shared reality: where sexist and sexual assaults are not the exception, but the norm. Each story reflects the pain of voicing these stories, which are often marked by shame or fear for survivors. Je Me Souviens is an invitation to break the silence, share testimonies that have long been shoved aside, and collectively unearth the invisible wounds the patriarchy inflicts on bodyminds.
Loïs Soleil
Through digital art, performance, installation, poetry, and sound Franco-Scottish artist Loïs Soleil's artistic practice aims to bridge the emotional and political by posing intersectional cyber/techno feminist questions. Her work confronts the everyday sexist structures of the web, its bias algorithms, and culure. It explores the relationships between pop culture, identity and voyeurism; to illustrate a female gaze through wich sexuality, love, vulnerability, and empowerment can be expressed.
Her work recently won an Ars Electronica Honorary Mention Award. She has been featured in several cultural events and institutions such as Cultuurcentrum Grimbergen, Centre Wallonie-Bruxelles | Paris, Marres, Beursschouwburg, argos centre for audiovisual arts, La Biennale de Liège (Mutantx), La biennale Chroniques, Centrale for Contemporary Art, iMAL Art Center for Digital Cultures & Technology etc
(c) Benjamin Huynh
TRAUMA(tanz)
Artist and costume designer Giulia Cauti draws inspiration from Dutch psychiatrist Dr. Bessel van der Kolk’s insights to explore the universality of trauma through material and movement. In her work, bioplastic structures act as metaphors for the lingering residue of past experiences. Their dissolvable nature reflects the impermanence of trauma's hold - suggesting that healing is possible, even if scars remain. In TRAUMA(tanz), each subject involved traces a map, feeling and interpreting one’s own trauma, following an interview session. Consequently to the experiences and the emotions they had chosen to share, they were then given a wearable sculpture made of bioplastic to physically react to. In this way, they could objectify their experience, channeling it to a place outside of themselves, transforming their past into a ritual of empowerment.
Part of the research project ‘TRAUM (dream) + RAUM (space) = TRAUMA" granted by the Italian Council program (13th edition, 2024) and promoted by the Directorate-General for Contemporary Creativity of the Italian Ministry of Culture.
Giulia Cauti
Giulia Cauti (1991, Italy/Brazil. she/her) is a costume designer, visual artist and performer. She graduated with Magna cum Laude as master in Visual Arts, Costume Design (Royal Academy of Fine Arts/RAFA - Antwerp, Belgium, 2021), focusing her master research on the various forms and meanings of trauma and how to translate them through visual and performing arts. Biomaterials became met- aphors for such goals, due to their appearance, characteristics and qualities.
She has recently completed the start research project ‘TRAUM (dream) + RAUM (space) = TRAUMA’, also within RAFA. She is among the recipients of the grant “Italian Council” (2024), promoted by the Directorate General for Contemporary Creativity of the Italian Ministry of Culture.
Chloé Wasselin Dandre
Chloé Wasselin Dandre (born 1996, France) has a degree in Graphic Design from Paris and a Bachelor's degree in Scenography and Costume Design from the Maastricht Theatre Academy. She works as a scenographer and costume designer for theatre. For her, theatre design is about playing with symbols, rituals, perception, space and time. She designs worlds in motion that become co-players for the performers.
She enjoys working with analogue machines, handmade objects, strong contrasts and bold colour choices. Since 2021, she has worked on projects with various theatres and companies, including NTGent, Werktoneel, KVS, De Studio, Theater Wuppertal, Het Nieuwstedelijk, SKaGeN, BERLIN, Bronks, Action Zoo Humain and HET Nieuwstedelijk.
For (UN)SHAME, she is designing a scenography for a museum for the first time.
© Darin Morsel
Marjan Doom & Bethan Burnside
Marjan Doom
Since 2020, Marjan Doom has been the artistic and general director of the GUM and the Botanical Garden. She sees the museum as a forum for doubt and friction, where diverse disciplines come together in a philosophical narrative about knowledge and imagination. In her exhibitions, she highlights the searching human being and does not shy away from social themes and taboos, with projects such as Post Mortem (2015), Phallus. Norm & Form (2022–2023) and Wunderkammer of TRUTH (2024–2025).
In addition to her work as a curator and author (Het Museum van de Twijfel, 2020), she conducts research at Ghent University into the role of museums as places for meaning-making and critical emancipation. She is a member of various advisory boards and governing bodies, including Musea Brugge, Forum Wissen Göttingen and KASK & Conservatorium Gent.
Bethan Burnside
Bethan Burnside is a neuroscientist turned curator in science, art and health. They draw on disability justice approaches and their lived experience to develop more caring, participatory, inclusive methods of curating. Their recent curatorial projects include For some time I've been standing (Kunsthal Ghent, 2025), An Institution is not an Island at (KASK & Conservatorium, 2025), and She Must Establish Himself (De Singel Arts Centre, 2025).
When Bethan is not curating, they work as a science communicator at the VIB-KU Leuven Center for Brain & Disease Research and serve as a steering committee member at the World Health Organization (WHO). Bethan is both a neuroscientist and curator by training, having graduated from both a Masters in Neuroscience from King’s College London and the Curatorial Studies postgraduate program at the Royal Academy of Arts in Ghent.
