Art by Jonas Vansteenkiste
Publication date: 20.05.2026
Jonas Vansteenkiste (1984) is a visual artist and curator who develops a multidisciplinary practice in which architecture and psychology converge. His work, ranging from installation and sculpture to video, photography and drawing, investigates how spaces function as mental constructions.
He studied at KASK Ghent (Bachelor in New Media, Master in Media Art) and completed an additional research year at Sint Lucas Antwerp. Since 2024, he has been Head of the Ceramics Department at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy. Vansteenkiste lives and works in Amsterdam and Kortrijk.
Central to his practice is the notion of mental space: an environment shaped by architectural elements in which perception, memory and emotion are structured. Drawing from personal experiences, he distils the anecdotal into underlying frameworks, allowing his installations to function as spaces for thought in which the viewer is actively positioned, both physically and mentally. Architecture and themes of house and home play a key role throughout his work.
Recent exhibitions include Coup de Théâtre. A Play of Clay at ABBY Kortrijk and Sottobosco at Museum Dr. Guislain (2026), as well as Cities and Eyes at Fridman Gallery in New York City and lumen in Berlin (2025).
For ARCHITECT@WORK Brussels, two works were selected that are emblematic of Jonas Vansteenkiste’s oeuvre.
One of these is Victoria May Thatcher (2019–2020), a key work in which his exploration of architecture as a psychological and political space comes sharply into focus. Created during a residency at the European Ceramic Work Centre, the sculptural work originates from a concrete experience in Liverpool. An ornamental element from a façade, originally intended as an embellishment within a social housing project, is enlarged, distorted and detached from its context. What was once a sign of care and dignity is transformed by Vansteenkiste into an obstruction: an element that literally blocks access to the home.
The title connects three historical figures, Queen Victoria, Margaret Thatcher and Theresa May, thereby evoking a layered history of social housing in the United Kingdom. It spans from Victorian idealism, in which architecture served as a tool for social uplift, through the neoliberal dismantling under Thatcher, to the contemporary crisis made painfully visible after the Grenfell Tower fire.
In Victoria May Thatcher, ornament shifts from aesthetics to critique. The work functions as a heterotopia: a space in which different temporal layers and ideologies converge and clash. Architecture here does not appear as a neutral backdrop, but as a carrier of power, memory and exclusion.
By transforming the house, traditionally a place of protection, into an inaccessible structure, Vansteenkiste poses a fundamental question: who has the right to live somewhere, and who is excluded?
A second work, A Pile of Homes (2014), is a sculpture that vividly articulates Vansteenkiste’s critical approach to architecture as a bearer of ideology and desire.
At first glance, the work appears to be an anonymous pile of stones, but closer inspection reveals fragments of houses: roofs, chimneys, window openings. What once stood for security and identity now appears as residue, torn from its context and reduced to a fragile mass. The sculpture refers to post war housing developments of the 1960s, in which living increasingly became governed by economic logic and speculation.
Aligned with the ideas of Alain de Botton, the work demonstrates how architecture helps shape our identity, while also revealing how standardised housing models undermine this potential. The houses invoked by Vansteenkiste are not places of meaning, but clichés, hollow promises of stability and happiness.
The pile itself functions as a contemporary ruin, resonating with the thinking of Walter Benjamin, in which construction and decay coincide. At the same time, it suggests a stratification of failed housing ideologies, from post war optimism to the neoliberal commodification of the home. Where Michel de Certeau describes space as something that is lived, Vansteenkiste presents the inverse: a space that has lost its inhabitants and remains only as form.
Yet A Pile of Homes also contains a gesture of care. By collecting and rearranging these fragments, Vansteenkiste turns ruin into monument, a silent reflection on what dwelling might have been. The sculpture thus balances between critique and melancholy, posing a fundamental question: what does it mean to be at home when that place itself proves unstable?
