Between memory and imagination: Marie Zolamian’s ‘Confabulations’ at WIELS Contemporary Art Center

Brussels is home to many layered identities and overlapping histories, which is why Marie Zolamian’s exhibition Confabulations finds a fitting home at WIELS Contemporary Art Center.

Showing work from the past two decades of her career, it includes notable projects creating sequences of images for her fictional ethnographies, as well as newly commissioned ones that resonate with the art space in Forest.

Zolamian collects fragments of encounters and stories, reassembling them into constellations that blur the line between the real and the invented. They explore self-rootedness in a globalised world: mixing Western and Eastern influences. For this exhibition too, she allowed impressions of the city to flow into her work. “Naturally, wherever I am, the environment where I will find myself will be present in the show,” she says.

Here, Confabulations refers to the blending of memory and imagination. Some works resemble miniature towns or carefully composed landscapes. Others function more like emotional archives. Across the exhibition, personal moments aim to feel like something that is both individual and collective.

Born in Beirut in 1975 to an Armenian family and raised in Lebanon until the age of 15, Zolamian now lives and works in Liège, where she teaches at the Fine Arts Academy. Her multinational background — Lebanese, Armenian and Belgian — is not simply biographical detail. It runs through her work in subtle but persistent ways, shaping how she approaches belonging, memory and place. “The history of the 1915 [Armenian] genocide is very anchored in our collective memory,” she says of her background.

The multidisciplinary artist speaks of exile not only as a geographic rupture but also as something more intimate. “I think it's the manner of finding your place in a family, in a society, in a city and in a country,” she says. “You can feel detached anywhere if you are not welcomed. That idea of inclusion, integration and the fragile process of finding your place is central to Confabulations.”

For Zolamian, art is language, and language is a tool of resistance. Rather than illustrating these themes directly, she translates them into environments: paintings, assemblages, drawings, murals, video and a newly commissioned sound installation that fills WIELS with layered voices.

Although the exhibition spans works dating back to 2006, Zolamian clarifies that it is not a retrospective. Some pieces reappear in the show almost as a rediscovery, for the artist as much as for the audience. Alongside them, newer works unfold, some created specifically for this exhibition. She also highlights the dedicated room for her drawings; the solo show format allowing space for works that too often remain invisible.

Her sound installation features a choral recording made up of multiple voices, languages and stories, layered into a polyphonic composition that reflects Zolamian’s interest in exchange and circulation.

The exhibition ends with a simple but symbolic act: visitors are invited to take something from the exhibition home with them — a small surprise gift. Zolamian describes it as an “offrande,” something of a ritual offering. She emphasises the transformative power of exchange, which can alter “the memory, the sight, the place, and what happens afterwards also.”

Confabulations
Until 17 May
WIELS
Avenue Van Volxem 354
Forest
Brussels

Photos: (main image) Marie Zolamian; Ensuquer, 2024, courtesy of the artist ©Roberto Ruiz; Le jardin sans soleil, 2023-2025 ©Marie Zolamian; Hodophiles, 2025 ©Marie Zolamian; Pusillanime, 2023 ©Marie Zolamian