Xavier Verhoest Biography

Born in DR Congo in 1964, Xavier Verhoest studied film editing in
Belgium. In 1992, he joined Médecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) as a
volunteer and worked until 2003 in Palestine, Kenya, Somalia,
Burundi, Rwanda etc.
 
Xavier Verhoest is the co-founder of Art2Be, an organization using
art and expression as a tool promoting positive living and social
changes.
 
For the last 20 years, he has engaged in numerous creative projects
on identity, memory, violence, peace, culture and heritage in
Kenya, Somalia, Burundi, Mali, Italy, Belgium etc.
 
In 2003, he initiates the project ‘Who I am, Who We are’, an
exploration of what it means to be Kenyan today using creative
tools.
 
Between 2002 and 2012 he curated more than 100 exhibitions in
Nairobi where he showed some of the most promising and prominent
artists based in the region.
 
As an artist, Xavier Verhoest has created a broad range of work
responding to the events, emotions, and relationships that he has
encountered in war zones and in the margin of the society. Most of
his works are evocative meditations on time and duration as well as
the themes of personal and collective memory.
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These are works that meditate on universal themes of mortality,
fragility, and the natural world.
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He has exhibited in Kenya, Ethiopia, Belgium, France and Germany.

Solo Exhibitions