Marie Zolamian
Confabulations
Marie Zolamian’s work invokes constellations where interior geographies, fabulated presences and microhistories intertwine to form visual worlds operating between observation and imagination.
Through painting, moving image, sound, drawing and site-specific work, Confabulations considers how memory is continuously reactivated and transformed, opening new routes towards shared imaginaries.
Marie Zolamian’s pictorial universes echo processes of displacement, hosting and being hosted. She collects traces of encounters, apparitions and stories along her way, and inscribes them within new, fabulated environments. Embracing hybrid, collective, chimerical and intimate recollections, Zolamian reveals how memory is endlessly transformed, regenerated and morphed.
Her paintings are inhabited by landscapes, architectures, figures and ornaments reminiscent of Eastern and Western iconographies — from medieval miniatures to prehistorical paintings; and from monumental frescoes to everyday offerings such as ex-votos.
“To paint is to inhabit those visible and invisible layers, to see a stratification being built where history and tradition deposit, dissolve, and reappear otherwise.”
The exhibition heralds an artistic career spanning two decades, featuring a selection of iconic projects as well as newly commissioned works conceived in resonance with the specific context of WIELS. It encompasses paintings, assemblages, drawings, ceramics, video, site specific mural paintings and a newly commissioned sound installation in which fragments of what the artist calls her “chosen exiles” come together in a polyphonic — at times cacophonic — composition. With this choral record made up of multiple voices, languages and stories, the artist invites us to rehearse dissonance as a generative space of togetherness.
To coincide with the WIELS exhibition, a monographic book titled Le jardin sans soleil, focusing on Zolamian’s drawings and recent paintings, will be published by Posture Editions. With texts by Vanessa Desclaux and Anthony Hudek.
Curator: Sofia Dati
With the support of: Gulbenkian Foundation
Biography
Marie Zolamian (b. 1975, Beirut) is a Belgo-Lebanese multidisciplinary artist of Armenian descent, who grew up in Lebanon until age of fifteen, currently living in Liège, where she teaches at the Fine arts Academy.
She has exhibited, among other places, at S.M.A.K., Gent (2025);at Bombon projects gallery, Barcelona (2024); Jester/CIAP, Genk (2022); galerie Nadja Vilenne (2019 and 2016); Mu.ZEE, Oostend (2018); Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin (2013) and in group exhibitions at at S.M.A.K., Gent (2025); BPS22, Charleroi (2023) and at WIELS, Brussels (2021). One of her major public works is a 76m2 mosaic for the peristyle of KMSKA (Antwerp, 2022) for which she was awarded the the Ianchelevici prize in 2023 for her architectural integration; and in 2025 she was granted the Pomona Art Prize.
