KMSKA LATE - Open Hemel

What if a work of art doesn’t just represent something, but builds a world? And what if that world turns out to be surprisingly relevant today? During this thought-provoking conversation, we’ll start with Jonas Eika’s book Open Hemel. In this radical and sensory novel, Eika reimagines the Beguine community as a place where spirituality, the body, and collectivity merge. History appears here not as something closed off, but as an open field that continues to influence the present. 

Drawing on this literary imagination, we turn our attention to the ways in which female religious figures actively shaped worlds. Their living environment was not a passive context, but a carefully constructed reality in which meaning was constantly created, rearranged, and passed on. 

Religious experience was never purely spiritual. It took shape in manual labor: in the making, repairing, and caring for objects. These practices conceal a form of curatorship avant la lettre: a process of selecting, organizing, and assigning meaning. By bringing objects and materials together, networks of rituals, care, and sensory experience emerged. 

Art historian and Beguine specialist Sarah Moran and programmer Siska Baeck will speak with Eika about curation as an act of imagination and organization. How do we build worlds—in art, in literature, in community? And which forms of knowledge and practice have long been overlooked in this process?

Don’t expect a traditional panel discussion, but rather an evening that challenges, opens up, and invites you to see things differently: art, history, and the ways in which we ourselves shape worlds.