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GUT MATTERS — You are a donut. The hole inside you is the world

After a mini residency in 2023 and several collaborations on ‘Wine and Whine’ events (together with VIERNULVIER/Marieke De Munck), Kunsthal Gent supported the further development of Gut Matters, Dani Bershan’s new project, through our development programma Permanently Practising. The trajectory will be followed by a premiere and exhibition of the project in Kunsthal Gent in February 2025. The exhibition coincides with a symposium around the project, supported by and organized at VIERNULVIER on the occasion of the festival Women and children First in March 2025.

GUT MATTERS invites you to tune into your guts. The project starts from the idea that our collective struggles — amid the ongoing global eco-bio-psycho-social crisis — reflect a lack of metabolic capacities and understanding, rather than a lack of information. As guardians of our intuition, immune systems, moods, and even personalities, guts are manifestations of interconnectedness in an exhausted world.

What happens in a political environment where conventional ambitions for amelioration or repair lie gutted, where we cannot stomach the status quo anymore? What can we learn by looking at the excrements of our civilization together? Through paying attention to the complex ecologies and processes of the gut? What do they reveal about our relationships with Earth, with evolution, with uncertainty, love, and responsibility? Can the gut help us access, remember and invent choreographies of connection? The gut biome, with its diversity and complexity, offers a tangible example of what happens inside holes. These aren’t empty spaces — they are full of aliveness and transformation, conversion and new growth.

GUT MATTERS explores the invisible microbial connections linking us to everything we coexist with. It’s an invitation to be moved by and through the world, to practice listening and paying attention to the holes in our lives. In these times of extinction, the project asks us to reflect on how we break down mass into energy and engage with the web of relations that sustain or sabotage these processes.

Our metabolic capacities mirror how we live, love, kill, and connect with one another and all beings on this planet. They remind us that everything matters — through and beyond us. They challenge illusions of separateness and invite us to embrace complexity, humility and collaboration.

Visitors are invited into a timeless, immersive space to resonate with the materials and reflect on these questions.

GUT MATTERS is co-produced and co-presented by Kunsthal Gent and VIERNULVIER.

Dani Bershan

Dani Bershan is an artist and independent researcher working on relational structures and the politics of intimacy on the intersection of art and ecology. Through her work – ranging from sculpture and performance to community facilitation and sound – she proposes practices of collective intimacy and care as a way to study and honour the complexity of interdependency and relational structures; She composes and holds potentia-spaces for sense-making practices and non-monotonic thinking.

#rehearseconnection

Dani co-founded and directed FATFORM (NL), and is co-founder and co-organiser of ELSEWHERE & OTHERWISE at Performing Arts Forum (FR). Her work and collaborations have been presented at ao. 29th Sao Paulo Biennale (BR), De Appel Arts Centre (NL), Centre Pompidou Kanal (BE), Berliner Festspiele /MaerzMusik (DE), KunstenfestivaldesArts (BE), Berlin Art Week (DE), W139 (NL), Portikus (DE), NAS Gallery Sydney (AU), Capacete (BR), Paradiso (NL), Oslo Internasjonale Teaterfestival (NO), Dansehallerne (DK), MDT (SE), Le CentQuatre (FR), CentroCentro (ES), Tempo Festival (BR) and Triennale Luxembourg (LUX).