LIMEN

From May 8 2026, Kunstraum hosted its “Limen” exhibition with artists Alexandra Leyre Mein and Stephan Balleux

Have you ever noticed this astonishing phenomenon? You are about to leave someone, after a long exchange. But it is only then, on the threshold, that the things that truly matter are finally said.

“Limen” signifies the threshold; it is a place of the ineffable, a zone of extreme intensity, a strangeness that exceeds the power of language. It is an unstable space, an intermediate phase where forms and images transmute. At the heart of this interstice, the works of Alexandra Leyre Mein and Stephan Balleux engage in a dialogue within the exhibition Limen, attempting to make perceptible what usually operates as a low hum: shifting, alteration, and survival. Like a ghostly memory of images and gestures that traverse time and reappear unexpectedly, this “survival” constitutes a point of convergence between the two artists.

Alexandra Leyre Mein’s sculptures, installations, videos and paintings emerge from a process that goes beyond mere formal will. They reflect the complexity of human behavior, the strangeness of our attitudes, and the ambivalence of our emotional states. Their hybrid morphologies—at once organic and mineral—give life to transitory states where matter acts as a seismograph of internal dynamics, capable of recording tensions, frictions, contractions, and invisible flows. At the threshold of figuration and abstraction, the bodies appear fragmented, contorted, and stratified. They seem to carry within them layers of multiple temporalities, opening our perception to a scale that is as much archaeological as it is cosmological.

Through a similar approach, Stephan Balleux engages in a reflection on the essence of the image by drawing from the visual flow of Western culture. Navigating between cinema, photography, and media, he shifts the prism of legibility of his chosen images, implementing a series of transformations that lead his paintings, engravings, and videos toward subversion. Faced with the saturation of the contemporary visual field—which paradoxically tends to reduce the space of the imaginary—Stephan Balleux still manages to unsettle us, creating images haunted by our fantasies.

Conceived as a heterotopia, an “other space”, this exhibition lays bare the invisible structures that sustain our daily lives to freeze, for the duration of a glance, the flow of passage. It becomes the vessel for a world in perpetual metamorphosis, where mythological and media vestiges intertwine. The artists remind us that truth rarely dwells in the obvious, and that it is often here, on the threshold, that things may happen.

Text and curation : Valentine Himpens-David