TICK TACK Presents Hard Love by Hannah Perry in Antwerp

TICK TACK presents Hard Love, British artist Hannah Perry's first solo exhibition in Belgium, on view through 1 August 2026.

A body that rebuilds itself does not do so quietly. Something cracks first, a foundation shifts, and what comes after carries the break inside its own structure.

This exhibition treats that process as a spatial and material fact, not a metaphor to be illustrated afterward.

The building itself makes the same argument. Three floors of exposed concrete and glass, built for transparency, hold a different kind of disclosure here.

What used to signal openness starts to read as exposure instead, the sense that nothing in the rooms above or below is fully finished, or fully hidden.

Perry treats collapse and reconstruction as the same material problem, what a structure can bear, what it hides, and what keeps sounding once the visible labour has stopped.

De Zonnewijzer, the brutalist landmark Léon Stynen designed in 1955, gives Hard Love its architecture as much as its address.

The building's six-metre street-facing window dissolves the line between inside and outside.

Its three floors of raw concrete were built to be seen, not decorated over.

Perry uses four rooms across all three levels, treating the structure less as backdrop than as a collaborator with its own history of labour and construction.

Antagonist (2024), a pair of colossal steel and resin forms shaped like a pelvis split open, occupies the floor directly behind Stynen's window.

At BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art in 2024, where the work first appeared, the structure was motorised, mechanically performing childbirth in slow, grinding repetition.

Poem: Deep house

the sound of the house settling at night
spent heat of some great beast I’d slain again
thin walls drum their hidden circuitry; fingertips,
naked bulbs, this old wiring, this deep internal material
I thought, it is beginning and in the backyard
strange flowers bloomed black through the
bruised scalp of night, sweating, I opened the taps
and a thin wire of violinists strung down the drain.
All my teenage madness. A wolf at the door,
a dog in the kitchen, her phantom pregnancy, her
litter of hot tin ghosts rattling the cutlery drawer.
I thought, the beginning always feels like this, like the end.
I always go too far. My appetite for ruin, my mornings after
when tooth white birds drink from ashtrays filled with rain

Danielle Wilde

Here it is stilled. The mechanism is gone, but something of the exertion seems to remain lodged in the joints, as though the piece is resting rather than finished.

Nearby, Rogue Aggregate bends rebar into looping lines that defy the material's own stiffness, the poles curving with the ease of something far softer.

Hesitation and Snare thread red resin forms, rounded and slack like spent balloons, onto the same rebar logic.

The resin presses against the metal without quite settling into it, its surface marked by small creases, the residue of air that has already left the room.

In the basement, the register changes completely. Reckless Icons runs four subwoofers through exposed brick under red light, an eight-minute sound piece moving through the chest before it reaches the ear.

Beside it, BPM (Thrash) multiplies the intensity twelvefold, subwoofers fixed inside a rebar cage, padlocks fastened at intervals, locking nothing in particular.

FENDER hangs motorbike fenders and chains under a single red striplight, and a trio of screenprints, Soft Collapse, Rogue Pulse and the eponymous Hard Love, repeats the same vocabulary on paper.

The accompanying text by Rosanna McLaughlin frames the show around matrescence, the shattering and rebuilding of the self that comes with becoming a mother, and the version of that self left behind, locked in the basement.

Perry has addressed this shattering before, but Hard Love builds the argument at full architectural scale rather than staging it as gesture. The timing matters.

Perry arrives in Antwerp on a fast-expanding institutional profile, including a place in British Art Show 10, and the show reads less like a survey than a rehearsal of where the work is heading, toward structures that hold weight rather than represent it.

The padlocks on BPM (Thrash) stay fastened along the cage.

They lock nothing shut. The sound runs for eight minutes and ten seconds, then it runs again, and the building keeps its transparency. What changes is what that transparency seems to disclose.

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Hannah Perry on Instagram