A forced stay in Brussels reminded me what a vibrant city for the arts it potentially is. A modest Australian artistic diaspora already has found its way to the capital of Europe.

In full corona-crisis an intrepid Australian artist and a Belgian curator set up a new kind of artspace that is neither gallery, neither artist-run space, neither place of worship, but bears aspects of all of these. The Agprognostic Temple is dedicated to the Unknown. Initiator Dome Wood, a Melbourne-born and bred artist living and working in Brussels, is responsible for its Manifesto and the physical scenography.

The Agprognostic Temple is an ongoing nomadic project of which the two first iterations took place in an existing gallery space in downtown Brussels in October and November 2020, just before the second lockdown in that city. “Scripted Truths” assembled the work of nine artists, while the second event was dedicated to Nicolas Provost, a Belgian filmmaker and artist.

Despite its itinerant nature, the temple is an actual physical space, an open, white structure within a pre-existing building. Placed as some kind of altar or centrepiece in each exhibition is a black hypercube. On the last day of the exhibition the ceremonial unveiling of this Cube of the Unknown, which holds one hidden keywork, takes place.

The Agprognostic Temple provides a breath of fresh air in an often superfluous art world that is prone to tendentiousness and commodification. This project goes back to the essence of art, art as a universal and deeply human necessity that transcends the art world and relates to the immaterial. Art that not only renders visible the invisible, but reveals the presence of the Unknown, that what we cannot know.

Through familiarising people once again with the Unknown, the Temple unabashedly proposes a new or lost angle to experience art.