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The LODGERS programme is a collaboration between AIR Antwerpen and M HKA . We welcome imaginative artistic initiatives to come and occupy the 6th floor at M HKA. The programme offers a unique opportunity for public interface, to organisations and initiatives who focus specifically on producing and commissioning, and who do not have their own public space. These LODGERS might be publishers, commissioning agencies, research initiatives, labels, collectives, discussion platforms and other initiatives experimenting with artistic practice who would be interested to live, work and perform in Antwerp.

LODGERS are welcomed from "Eurocore" – the combined region of Benelux and the Rheinland. Free entrance to visit our LODGERS. Come and say hello!

The LODGERS programme is co-curated by Nav Haq, Senior Curator at M HKA, and Alan Quireyns, Artistic Director at AIR Antwerpen.

Pages is a bilingual Farsi/English magazine initiated by Nasrin Tabatabai and Babak Afrassiabi in 2004. It is published sporadically in the Netherlands and its content always expands from the artists’ own practice. As an independent magazine, Pages provides a platform through which interconnected topics can be thought and explored outside the mainstream, market oriented network of the art world. Pages’ content is produced partly in the Netherlands and partly in Iran, and always collaboratively through long-term engagements with other contributors. 

The recurring concern for Pages in the recent years has been the relationship between contemporary art and the archive. Digital technology has resulted in the proliferation of ad hoc archives. The archive has become permeable and is no longer bearer of historical context. The question that arises from this is if art still can rely on the archive as a historical premise?

During the period of their residency the artists will begin working on the next issue of Pages. The research and editing process that will follow, through collaboration and engagement of invited authors (artists, writers, theorists etc.), will be made public in M HKA’s LODGERS space. The space will become a temporary laboratory for experimenting with various materials, thoughts and propositions that are gathered and produced during this process.

The magazine’s new issue will evolve along two lines: opium and computational predictive pathology. If opium’s ingestion as smoke eased its commodification during the 19th century, it also enabled the appropriation of the human airways into the expanse of the opium ’s capitalist trade networks. It wouldn’t be too far fetched then to argue that this expropriation of the lung anticipated what has become in the twenty-first century computational capitalism the total exteriorisation of our organs by technologies to which we hand over an increasing part of our biological and cognitive functions. However the smoke of opium was never fully confined to the capitalist web. The new issue of Pages will trace the toxic but also the remedial agency of opium in literary fiction as a critical detour towards this exteriorisation. The content of this issue will vary from fictional to hypothetical texts, archival reprints and artists contributions.

This issue of Pages is anticipated to be published by mid 2017. This will be an occasion for the artists to return to the M HKA to launch the new Pages, which begun evolving during the artists’ residency at the Lodgers program. This event will be accompanied by presentations and readings by authors who are contributing to the magazine. Details about the launch and the exact date will be announce in the coming months.