SUMMER FESTIVALS
Couleur Café
Over 80 artists spanning a multitude of genres will gather at the Atomium under the banner of world music for the 2024 edition of Couleur Café. Tems, Action Bronson, Masego, Tyla, Biga*Ranx and SiR are just some of the acts that will take the stage with the Atomium as the backdrop.
June 28-30
Rock Werchter
This annual rock music festival has been taking place near Leuven since 1976, drawing over 100,000 attendees over four days. This year’s headliners include Dua Lipa, Foo Fighters, The Hives, Slovedive, Snow Patrol and the Bombay Bicycle Club.
July 4-7
Brosella Festival
This urban jazz festival in Molenbeek features an international lineup, from Kara Jackson and Oumou Sangaré to Belgium’s own Flat Earth Society and TaxiWars. Brosella has been holding outdoor concerts held in picturesque surroundings in Brussels since 1977.
July 6-7
Les Ardentes
Four-day electro-rock festival Les Ardentes is relatively new to the Belgian music festival scene, debuting in Liège in 2006. It attracts more and more music fans each year, and the 2024 edition is bringing some big names with Nicki Minaj, Yeat, Central Cee, DJ Snake, Gunna, Offset, Doja Cat and 21 Savage.
July 11-14
Tomorrowland
Tomorrowland is for those who want to dance. Held outside of Antwerp since 2006, it’s one of the most famous musical festivals in the world and has a slew of awards to show for it, including five consecutive wins for ‘best musical event of the year’.
The list of artists is massive and features some promising and lesser-known names, but some of the biggest gets are SHM, Guetta, Maddix, DJ Diesel (aka Shaquille O'Neal), Gryffin, horsegiirL and Timmy Trumpet, along with Brussels’ own Odymel.
July 19-21 and 26-28
Pukkelpop
Pukkelpop is one of Belgium’s biggest musical festivals, held amid the forests just outside of Hasselt. It attracts upwards of two hundred thousand fans of all sorts of music, from dance and pop to metal and rap.
Known for a mix of local talent and major world stars, the 2024 lineup includes Fred Again.., Rise Against, Sam Smith, Skrillex and Thom Yorke’s newest project, The Smile.
August 15-18
THE BRUSSELS RENAISSANCE FESTIVAL
The 2024 edition of the Brussels Renaissance Festival will shine over three days, with processions, performances and even play time for the little ones during a special Family Day. In the remains of Charles V’s palace, kids can dress up as knights and ladies, shoot a crossbow and swing a sword.
The Grand Place will be a focal point, as well. Some 1,400 costumed participants will lend their talents to recreating the aura of the most prosperous period in the history of Brussels, when the Holy Roman Emperor himself called it home.
Until July 4
Various events of differing locations and times
www.visit.brussels/en/visitors/agenda/brussels-renaissance-festival
ELLIOTT ERWITT: A RETROSPECTIVE
This exhibition featuring the work of celebrated photographer Elliott Erwitt – the most comprehensive to date – is coming to the Grand Place in Brussels. It includes over 215 photographs by the late French-born American photographer, famous for his black-and-white photos of absurd situations in everyday settings.
Distinguished by his humour, tenderness, curiosity and keen sense of irony, Erwitt’s photographs emphasise emotion rather than the dry intellectual approach often associated with advertising and documentary photography.
Until January 5, 2025
Open Wednesday to Monday from 10am to 6pm
5 Grand Place, 1000 Bruxelles
€16 admission, discounted rates available
THESE CIRCUMSTANCES
Foundation CAB presents a multidisciplinary group exhibition featuring Greet Billet, Katinka Bock, Manon de Boer, Willy De Sauter, Céline Mathieu, Guy Mees and Johanna von Monkiewitsch. Works from the seven artists play on themes of simultaneous presence and absence, boundless pictorial space, construction, deconstruction, light, play, memory and time.
Presented alongside one another and intended to highlight what happens between viewer, artwork, and the surrounding space, the chosen works encourage comparison and dialogue – and maybe even a second look.
Until 29 June
Wednesday to Saturday from 12pm to 6pm
Borrensstraat 32, 1050 Brussel
€6 admission, €3 for students
LA HUACA LLORA
French artist Louidgi Beltrame pursued his focus on decolonisation all the way to Peru, where he's been carrying out research since 2012. From that research comes La Huaca Llora, an exhibition of films, photographs, ink drawings on canvas and a sculpture, all exploring the figure of the huaquero, or 'clandestine grave digger'.
Until July 7
From Thursday to Sunday, 1pm to 6pm
Rue de l’Ermitage 86, 1050 Brussels
Free admission
BRUSSELS DANCE BATTLE
Brussels can dance. If there were ever any doubts, they’ll be laid to rest at this year’s Brussels Dance Battle, featuring four different categories and the central theme of vibrations. Dancers will compete in Hip hop, Krump, House and Ksaar, with a final four-way battle featuring the winners from each category going head to head.
Vibrations are the language of street dance, organisers say, conveying messages of reflection on the past and conjecture about the future while carrying the culture through time, as one dancer teaches the next.
July 11
Doors open at 2pm
Boulevard Anspach 110, 1000 Brussels
Free admission
FOREVER BREAD: DU GRAIN AU PAIN
Per the promise in the exhibition title, the Brussels Museum of the Mill and Food aims to guide visitors through an appreciative journey of the bread-making process from grain to loaf. From seed selection to the baker’s workshop, the exhibition explores what’s considered to be the keystone of the human diet.
‘Our daily bread’ is an ancestral preparation, it asserts, the product still a staple for countless cultures and countries. With its warme bakkers and heavy influence from French cuisine, Belgium is hardly an exception. Discover not only how it’s made, but how that process has changed as people have.
Brussels Museum of the Mill and Food
Until June 29
Tuesday to Friday from 10am to 12:30 and 1:30pm to 5pm, Saturday from 1pm to 5:30pm
Rue du Moulin à Vent 21, 1140 Evere
Free admission
BRUXELLONS
The 26th edition of the Festival Bruxellons will take place this summer at the Château du Karreveld in Molenbeek-Saint-Jean, where around 100 performances of 15 shows will take audiences into the heart of one of the popular musicals of the past decade: Come from Away.
Bruxellons will present the world premiere of the French version, which tells the true story of the 7,000 passengers on 38 airliners who made an emergency landing on September 11, 2001, in the small Newfoundland town of Gander. There, the locals did everything in their power to welcome the stranded passengers from five different continents, resulting in friendships that would last a lifetime.
From July 11 to September 28
Around 100 performances of 15 shows at various locations in Brussels
€4 admission
CALIFORNIA LIGHT
Galerie La Patinoire Royale Bach’s is running a solo exhibition of Los Angeles abstract artist Casper Brindle, whose layered installations capture and refract light, creating a objects of soft luminosity. Heavily influenced by southern California's surf and car culture of the 1960s and 70s, his monochromatic pieces appear to have austere white surfaces.
However, as the viewer moves around them, nuanced depths becomes apparent and ghostly layers rise to the surface and new structures emerge. Atmospheric gradations of colour are encased in hardened surfaces in a constant push and pull between depth, light and texture.
Galerie La Patinoire Royale Bach
Until July 27
Tuesday to Friday from 11am to 7pm, Saturday from 11am-6pm
Rue Veydt 15, 1060 Brussels
Free admission
