At the invitation of curator Christa Vyvey for the exhibition Genesis, a collection in movement, Jonas Vansteenkiste developed a new site-specific installation titled Cella Naos. The project emerged from the curatorial framework, which asked contemporary artists to engage in a conceptual dialogue with a selected work from the Moget Collection. Vansteenkiste chose to enter into conversation with Girl in a Darkroom, a poignant and enigmatic piece by Marlene Dumas.

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This choice was not incidental. Dumas’ oeuvre has long exerted a powerful influence on Vansteenkiste’s practice, both formally and thematically. He has been particularly drawn to her exploration of social exclusion, power structures, and racial politics—as seen in her recurring treatment of themes such as apartheid, marginality, and the dynamics of visibility. Moreover, Vansteenkiste finds deep resonance in her poetic titling strategies and her distinctive use of ink, which in Dumas’ drawings functions as both substance and metaphor: simultaneously staining, concealing, and revealing.

In Cella Naos, Vansteenkiste constructs a physical and conceptual space that reflects these layered interests. The title refers to the innermost chamber of a classical Greek temple—the naos or cella—which housed the cult image of a deity. This sacred core was the focal point of ritual and symbolic significance, yet often remained inaccessible to the public. Vansteenkiste adopts the skeletal architectural language of a temple, creating an open, frame-like structure that suggests rather than replicates such a sacred interior. At the heart of this spatial proposition, he places Dumas’ Girl in a Darkroomas though it were an icon or relic—elevated, guarded, contemplated.

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This act immediately provokes a range of interpretative questions:
Is this a literal spatial translation of the room depicted in Dumas’ painting?
Is it a tribute, a shrine, a spatial portrait of the emotional resonance of her work?
Or is it an autonomous sculptural installation that merely echoes, reinterprets, or even deconstructs the themes present in Dumas' oeuvre?

The ambiguity is intentional. Vansteenkiste often works with architectural archetypes—homes, corridors, shelters, borders—not as fixed places, but as psychological containers. In Cella Naos, the architectural gesture is not to recreate, but to suggest a space charged with memory, reverence, and confrontation. The installation becomes a spatial metaphor for the act of looking at art, of being in proximity to an image charged with social and emotional intensity.

The entire wooden structure is saturated with ink—a material nod to Dumas’ medium of choice. Yet in Vansteenkiste’s hands, ink becomes more than a reference: it stains the installation as a whole, permeating the material with a substance historically linked to writing, drawing, and record-keeping. Ink here is both homage and medium of transformation, invoking Dumas’ fluid, unstable boundaries between figure and abstraction, between presence and erasure.

By fusing architectural form with material resonance, Cella Naos becomes a kind of ritual space—not religious in a traditional sense, but devotional in its attention to artistic influence, vulnerability, and the politics of representation. It is a work about the spaces we construct around art, both literally and metaphorically: the frames we build, the meanings we assign, and the silences we inhabit in front of powerful images.

Ultimately, Cella Naos is not a reconstruction, but a reverberation. It is a space haunted by another space, a structure built from influence, memory, and admiration. In doing so, Vansteenkiste offers not only a tribute to one of his formative idols, but a reflection on the way artistic legacies continue to shape, challenge, and shelter us.

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