Safae Gounane

She’s Aware of Her Immortality

5 September – 17 October

Safae Gounane (1999) is a visual artist who graduated in 2022 from the Royal Academy of Art (KABK). Her work emerges from a personal translation of themes such as existentialism, metaphysics, human relationships, social structures, and feminism. Working from an intersectional approach and intuition, Safae explores the body as a carrier of memories, emotions, and traumas. She questions the hurried, capitalist world in which we survive, and searches for the human core that risks getting lost within it. In doing so, she envisions a universal quest for meaning, for oneself, for others, and for the world around us.

In She’s Aware of Her Immortality, Safae builds on her previous solo exhibition Dancing While the World Is on Fire (Chillzone Books, Het Veem, 2025). At the time, she explored how we can remain optimistic and hopeful in an increasingly strange and darker reality. Taking nightlife as her starting point, she examined personal and collective shadow sides, intimacy, dance, rest, friendship, recurring fascism, and patriarchal structures in society. Pleasure, in that context, was not a distraction from resistance but rather the necessary condition for recharging and continuing to stand for what we believe in.

In answering the question of how we can remain optimistic, Safae encountered shame, the theme this new exhibition builds upon. In conversations with friends and strangers, she noticed that shame keeps returning in different forms: the fear of trying something, the dread of others’ judgment, feeling too old, or the sense of falling short. Safae links these experiences to the societal pressure to measure up and the paralyzing fear of standing out. Full surrender to pleasure and authenticity becomes impossible, after all, when such thoughts dominate.

This brings her to new questions: if introspection is dissected down to its smallest details, what remains? What invisible worlds come to light, how do emotions manifest in the body, and what visual form can be given to them?

The figures Safae depicts are not existing people, but imaginary manifestations of intuition, cultural background, and memory. They arise from a collection of images she has been building since her high school years. Through intuitive drawing, repeating, distorting, and copying, forms gradually appear that feel both familiar and strange at once. This process of “not-knowing” keeps the encounter exciting. Over time, these figures claim their own place within her practice; through painting, she gets to know them better and their relationship deepens. Each work has its own state or storyline, but the works flow into and connect with one another. The figure-eight shape that appears in some of the figures also arose intuitively and repeatedly in her work. Only later did she discover the analemma: the figure-eight-shaped curve the sun traces in the sky over the course of a year. This coincidental resemblance retroactively gave the work an extra layer of meaning.

In She’s Aware of Her Immortality, Safae explores how she can let these figures exist in their full authenticity, with unabashedness taking the upper hand. For Safae, cycle-breakers are the epitome of being unabashed. This does not come without consequences; people will have an opinion about it, or look down on you. But where does the process of being yourself, and fully embracing that actually begin?

Safae further expands her feminist perspective by depicting figures who stay close to themselves and live from a genuine place. Figures that embody all states of “being” and make room for contradiction and interconnectedness. They may be distorted, self-assured, mysterious, strange, sensual, uncomfortable, powerful, or tender. Through this layeredness, Safae explores how freedom arises when a body no longer has to conform to expectations, but is fully allowed to be itself.

The exhibition She’s Aware of Her Immortality by Safae Gounane runs from September 5, 2026, through October 17, 2026.