In Palais (2020), Alex Reynolds (Bilbao in 1978) takes us on a guided tour of the Palace of Justice in Brussels, a 19th-century building inaugurated in 1883 during the reign of Leopold II. It was the most colossal architectural project in Europe at the time. Spanning 26,000 m², the building’s dome stands out in the extensive urban landscape of Brussels. A symbol of state power, order and law, as well as of bureaucracy, institutional importance and control. An entire neighbourhood, Marolles, was demolished during its construction, displacing thousands of people from their homes.

Reynolds enters this massive body with her camera as if to interrogate it, delving deep into its corridors, lifts and offices to record the sounds that emerge from them: dripping, echoes, breathing, the sound of her own footsteps. In its enormity, the Palace ceases to be an objective space and becomes a living organism that smells, cracks, digests and observes.

Reynolds transforms this clandestine incursion into a bodily experience, into a wordless dialogue between the body and that which is activated by traversing it. Scale is mutated through space. In this way, the architecture itself occasionally makes her feel tiny and, at other times, makes her grow until she is touching the ceiling. This drifting is captured in a performative text from 2017 that the author situates at the beginning of the project: “...I am tiny”, “...I am clumsy”, “...I am very tall”. The building and the artist engage in a reciprocal process of transgression, caution and suspicion.

Palais represents both a poetic and political gesture: the artist introduces a crack into this space of power in the form of a body that listens, observes and opens itself determinedly to reveal the opacity it unveils.

(On display in Bilduma, ikusgai program from 30 October 2025 to 4 January 2026)