Can you recognize someone who you don’t know and have never seen them in person? Since a week I have had the evidence, because I walked through the Brussels Museum Bozar, where there is a hundred years of black, figurative art. From the corner of my eye, I noticed the woman, who wore her raincoat in a Mediterranean way: loose sleeves, the jacket as a cape. Somehow, I always get happy with that gestation. But now I saw that she also looked at me, and I suspected that we had to know each other. But how? She spoke the redeeming word, because she was Caroline de Gruyter, European Respondent and columnist for this newspaper, with a matching portrait photo. In the same way she had detected me, two colleagues who recognized each other’s newspaper faces and now spoke live.
Both deeply impressed by all those painters and artists, which we had often never heard of. Only later I noticed the golden coincidence of the exhibition title: When we see uscurated by Koyo Kouoh, who died unexpectedly last May. She was the intended curator of the 61st Biennale of Venice in 2026.
The title is a paraphrase of the Netflix series When they see us from 2019in which the story is told of five black and colored young men, who were wrongly seen as suspects in the case of the so -called Central Park Jogger. In the New York park, a young woman was heavily mistreated and raped on the evening of 19 April 1989, in which the wrong perpetrators were arrested and were sentenced to long prison sentences. It later became clear that the white outsiders’ tin had been guilty of the African-American and Latis-American young men in advance. Wrongly, it would be apparent.
In Bozar, the idea is, they don’t look at us, but we at us; The recognition is preserved. And so there is also room for ‘Black Joy’.
Man and I walked further in Brussels, a city that always reminds me of the Amsterdam of the 1980s: slightly chaotic, still enough rough edges. But also with a multicultural metropolitan, while Amsterdam is segregated much more agitably.
We stayed at Antoine Dansaertstraat, where ten years ago were the hip clothing stores. That street leads directly to Sint-Jans-Molenbeek, the neighborhood in Brussels where About 43 percent Of the residents calls himself Muslim. Now I see that on the last part of Dansaertstraat the halal tents are on the rise. There, and also further in the center, many young women with Hijab move confidently on the street. I am now the man of When they see us? The non-Muslim who looks around biased around him? Is Amsterdam-Zuid the reserve and not this Brussels neighborhood?
I can’t figure it out, because that same day we were not greeted but bought, there is no other word for it: “Assalam Aleikum!“An older man with Kufi on his head. Mechanically I mumbled” Assalam “back, but my husband shouted cheerfully:”And a happy day for you“.
This unknown man with white hat had also recognized us, namely as Muslims, but apparently we were from the Haram variant: my husband in very hip, striped pants, I in Bermuda with knee-long stockings, on the head a so-called Newsboy cap. Was this a verbal correction?
In summary: once recognized someone I did not know, not recognized once myself but misunderstood. That side-and-we-thing, it never stops.
Stephan Sanders is an essayist.