‘No blossom no moonlight’ is the final part of the first STRT KIT, a project operating as an international support initiative for emerging visual artists based in Antwerp.
Organized by Studio Start in collaboration with AIR Antwerpen and Extra City Kunsthal. Curated by João Mourão & Luís Silva (co-directors of Kunsthalle Lissabon).

Five emerging visual artists, selected by an international jury out of an open call, took part in this international development program. For the duration of one year they used a collective work and presentation space, met international curators, artists and organizers and participated in a project week in Beirut. This exhibition presents new work by all artists, dealing with the encounters and experiences that happened throughout the year.

Rather than presenting itself as thematic group show, or intending to bring a set of different artistic practices under one unifying narrative umbrella, and simplifying them in the process, ‘No blossom no moonlight’ seeks to construct an exhibition by defining what it is not able to do and simultaneously to engage with the artworks by addressing and exploring that which they are not. The title of the exhibition already signals this by informing the visitors what they will not encounter in the exhibition space. This idea of curating as apophasis, or as a via negativa, thus presents itself as an extremely productive rhetorical device, one which, through ideas on the exclusion of known negatives and argument by denial, activates what the exhibition is really about.