BORDERS | New Expo at Ghent University Museum & Botanical Garden
Step into an exhibition that challenges where things end and begin. Expect hands-on citizen science, bold artistic voices, intriguing objects from science and heritage, and a scenography that transforms space into experience. As always, our signature blend of curiosity, aesthetics, and precision will pull you right in.
To collide, to balance, and to move between yourself, the other, and the world
What are borders?
They mark where something ends and begins.
They create order — between countries, people, inside and outside, me and you. They can feel safe, but also constricting, when they limit who you can be or where you can go. For scientists, borders help to study things and phenomena, neatly categorized.
But what are borders, really, if we all experience them differently?
BORDERS invites you to rethink your boundaries — from your body to the world around you. Together with scientists and artists, explore the fringes and no man’s lands of borders: where things rub and collide, or where new connections begin to emerge…
What might happen if we dare to cross over?
On view from 26.03.2026 until 11.04.2027
Where art meets science
Five artists or duos creating works for the exhibition: Bieke Depoorter, Robbert & Frank | Frank & Robbert, Lana Schneider, Luanda Casella and playField. Each exploring in their own way what it means to guard or cross a border.
Bieke Depoorter
Bieke Depoorter, the renown Magnum Photographer, turns her lens inward, probing the camera’s own boundaries—between connection and intrusion, trust and transgression. Depoorter is known for her intimate, collaborative approach that explores the boundaries between photographer and subject. Projects like As It May Be highlight how trust and shared narratives shape photography. For BORDERS Depoorter is currently creating an intervention covering those themes, in close collaboration with our scenographer and curatorial team.
Robbert & Frank, Frank & Robbert
Robbert & Frank, the Ghent-based duo known for their poetic and playful approach, will transform the greenhouses and gardens with new work about frontiers, portals, and gatekeepers – and put a smile on visitors’ faces. Their projects are presented internationally, inviting audiences into spaces of wonder and reflection.
playField and Lana Schneider
playField is an art collective consisting of Marthe and Lana Schneider. Their work lies at the intersection of art and science. Their interest in society and human behaviour is often expressed through interactive installations, where the boundary between the artwork and the audience becomes blurred. For BORDERS, playField developed a diorama that represents a liminal space.
In addition, Lana Schneider also created a large mural focusing on the aesthetic element of scientific graphs that are featured throughout the exhibition.
Luanda Casella
Luanda Casella is a Brazilian writer, theater maker and performer who lives in Belgium. Through her work, Casella explores everyday communication and the influence that communication has on our perception of the world. As a resident artist at NTGent, she has created several performances, including Short of Lying, which was staged at the GUM, among other venues. For BORDERS, Luanda Casella wrote a number of powerful and striking sentences that can be read in the museum and around Ghent.
Marjan Doom
Curator GUM & Botanical Garden
The exhibition brings together a diversity of perspectives and conveys how boundaries define and rub against each other, never being fixed or neutral. In this way, BORDERS opens up a space of not knowing and uncertainty, in which doubt is not a shortcoming but a necessary attitude. This is precisely where the exhibition touches on the core of GUM & Botanical Garden, where doubt forms the starting point for critical insight, imagination and new ways of thinking.
”Inspiring constellation of artists
