Silence, Third Wave Feminist. A Misandrist Is Talking

Upstream Gallery is pleased to present Silence, Third Wave Feminist. A Misandrist Is Talking a new solo exhibition by Marijke De Roover.

You walk in and the title is already doing the work. Not subtle, not coy, just sitting there like a dare. Who is supposed to be silent, who gets to speak, and why does it feel so blunt it almost loops back into embarrassment. You try to locate the misandrist, the third wave feminist, and immediately you are caught. No outside position. You are already in it.

At the center: My Bed (Unmade, Unmoored, Unrepentant), 2026. Calling it a bed is both obvious and wrong. It is where the vertical world collapses. No productivity, no posture, no performance. Just the horizontal body that scrolls, stalls, spirals, wants, refuses. The bed is not symbolic after the fact. It is already a theory of how a subject exists now. Messy, stalled, overexposed.

The sheets are hand-stitched. Repetition as labor you cannot ignore. “All work is women’s work” lands less like a slogan and more like a quiet inevitability. Even lying here counts. Even falling apart counts. The empty bottles are not props. They track time badly. Days that drag, days that blur. Not progress, just oscillation.

Books in the bed: Dworkin, MacKinnon. Not revered, not dismissed. Lived with. Argued with. Half absorbed. “Trans women are women” is not the conflict. It is the baseline. The tension is elsewhere, in inheriting a language that explains you and injures you at the same time. Theory as both tool and weight.

The piece knows what it is doing. Theory where it should not be. On fabric, next to stains, next to a body that will not stand up straight. This is not empowerment. It is exposure without control. You do not step outside ideology. You lie in it. The fantasy of distance is part of the structure. All you can do is shift things around. New phrases, new arrangements, same bed. No resolution. No redemption.

Around it, the larger works: blunt, loud, almost crude. Fragments of radical feminist theory ripped out of context and compressed into meme form. What used to be slow and dense now moves fast and thin. These lines do not argue. They hit and vanish. Then come back misread, misused, detached.

You recognize the mechanism because it is yours. The speed, the flattening, the theft. The work does not fix it. It leans into it. Meaning arrives quickly, feels sharp, then slips. Like trying on someone else’s glasses and getting a headache.

Then I Meet Someone / They Leave, 2026. Three videos on top of a circular meme sticker. The gallery as feed you cannot exit. The rhythm is exact: setup, digression, sudden insight that feels real for about ten seconds. Then reset. Again.

Everything shows up. Culture, trauma, desire, ideology. Nothing sticks. The figure performing it all feels familiar. Half thinker, half clown, fully aware of being watched. Pain as content. Insight as style. You laugh, then stop, then keep watching anyway.

The sticker underneath spells it out: meet, attach, understand, lose, repeat. Not hidden, not subtle. A loop with no edge. You are not outside it. Watching is part of it.

No clean takeaway across the exhibition. No program, no way out. Just staying in it. Horizontal, unfinished. The bed does not fix you. The memes do not clarify. The videos do not free you. They just show the conditions: ideas moving too fast, detaching too easily, surviving as fragments.

Silence, Third Wave Feminist. A Misandrist Is Talking.

And you are still in the bed. Not because you do not see the problem, but because stepping out was never really available. And, worse, because some part of you would miss it.

 

Marijke De Roover (1990, Belgium) is a performance and visual artist based in Ghent. She holds a BA and MA in Fine Arts from KASK School of Arts, Ghent, where she was nominated for the Start Point Prize (Prague). In 2021, she had her first solo exhibition in the Netherlands at Museum de Pont, Tilburg.

Her work has been exhibited at Centre Pompidou (Paris), Museum für Neue Kunst (Freiburg), Museum de Pont (Tilburg), EMST (Athens), M HKA (Antwerp), Garage Rotterdam, Point Éphémère (Paris), UNTITLED (Moscow), BOZAR (Brussels), Extra City Kunsthal (Antwerp), Mu.ZEE (Ostend), ARCADE (London), KIOSK (Ghent), ISELP (Brussels), Museum Angewandte Kunst (Frankfurt am Main), among others.

 

Image: Silence, Third Wave Feminist. A Woman Who Noticed Men Kinda Suck Is About to Speak, 2025 by Marijkde De Roover.