Hugo Roelandt

The Belgian artist Hugo Roelandt (1950-2015) is one of the pioneers of performance art in Belgium in the seventies and eighties. He consciously operates outside the art market and has an eye for questions about society. Besides that, he was a real ‘artist’s artist’ and a reference in both his city of origin Aalst and in Antwerp, where he lived for most of his life. He advocated an art beyond the art market and geared towards society. During the mid-seventies he visualises gender and identity fluidity in a way that is still relevant.

Combining his insights from photography and performance art, he evolves towards a personal crossover of performance, documentation and installation art for which he coins the label 'post-performance'. Charismatic and energetic, he continuously cooperates with a multitude of people.

Hugo Roelandt generously bequeathed part of his estate to the Antwerp Academy, where he was a teacher in the photography department. In consultation with Lydia Van Loock, his spouse, the Academy decided that the artists' archive should stay together at M HKA as a platform for research about the artist and performance art in Belgium.