Grace Ndiritu's Post-Hippie Pop Abstraction at Arcade, Brussels explores ritual and anti-consumerism

Grace Ndiritu's exhibition Post-Hippie Pop Abstraction at Arcade in Brussels runs through 9 July, featuring collages and assemblages from an ongoing series started in 2015. These works incorporate altered fragments from fashion ads and news magazines, painted in tropical pastels that extend onto gallery walls, critiquing late capitalism. Specific pieces include a Time magazine cover photo of an Ebola doctor in a hazmat suit adorned with a Matissean green leaf, and a sequin CND sign placed upside-down on an image of Cara Delevingne alongside a newspaper clipping about low terror attack statistics. Ndiritu's broader practice, spanning video, photography, and performance, engages with reclaiming art's ritual function and magico-religious practices, aligning with a Beuysian artist-as-shaman tradition. Two video works titled Community, from 2014 and 2012–15, shot in intentional New Age communities like Hare Krishna groups and eco-communes, inform her approach. Her project Healing the Museum (2012–), part of a residency at SMAK in Ghent, involves historical research, film screenings, group meditations, and collective healing ceremonies as a form of institutional exorcism. The exhibition transforms anticonsumerist agitprop into totems of a syncretic system emphasizing ethics, sharing, and participation to revitalize gallery contexts.