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With works by: Lazara Rosell Albear, Roberta Gigante, Hans Haacke, Jacqueline Mesmaeker, Elisabeth Ida Mulyani, Beat Streuli en Albert Oehlen.

M HKA (INBOX) & NICC (Nick Lodgers) invited Luk Lambrecht & Lieze Eneman to create an exhibition for the museum spaces on the upper floor.

Dealing with art is comparable to a cycle in nature. Art moves both itself, and anyone who is looking for images that help overcome uncertainty. Art can be a refuge that helps to keep one's escape from reality in perspective. Coming face to face with beauty – a beauty that is based on an intense relationship with both life and coexistence, as experienced within the context of what art is – produces a positive mental factor of immeasurable value.

Today, art breaks down into many particles that float side by side, forming a 'cloud' of boundless diversity. It is quite apparent that art digests itself quickly: celebrated oeuvres are soon exchanged for others, and those of older artists are often covered by the patina of time, as they are no longer considered 'useful and serviceable' to the art market.

With the modest exhibition "As Close As That", held in three rooms of the upper-floor M HKA, INBOX and Nick Lodgers-spaces, we want to make a presentation that is close, intimate and world-oriented.

Restrictions on the use of public space as a form of physical distancing have rapidly become key factors in the protection of public health. The impact of the present pandemic on the perception and use of the public space is incalculable. Will it accelerate tendencies towards privatisation and, as a result, cause the public space to become increasingly less res publica? Will the global health crisis lead to an even more massive recourse to digital space and what are its social consequences - from growing individualism to the fragmentation of freedom and democracy?  Or does this unprecedented crisis actually reveal the unsustainability of the selfish individualism that is symptomatic of our neo-liberal, hyper-individualist consumer society?

This exhibition, set against the background of these topical questions, focuses on the experience of our personal life versus many ways of coexisting.