Eddie Peake and Metahaven on the breakdown of meaning in the age of AI

For one week in May, Antwerp turns into a maze of openings, performances and packed-out gallery rooms. Marked by pink graphics on lampposts across the city, Antwerp Art Weekend spreads itself across the city's museums and white cubes. Among the big crowd-pulling shows at M HKA and FOMU, and the tighter, stranger exhibitions tucked into backroom galleries, two stood out: Death Rattle, a solo exhibition by British artist Eddie Peake at TICK TACK. And the Belgian premiere of The Feeling Sonnets (Transitional Object), the latest film by Amsterdam-based collective Metahaven, was shown a day earlier at PHILLIPS, a TICK TACK off-site location in the heart of the city.

On the surface, the two shows couldn’t be more different – one is all about feelings and the intangible; the other, language and structure. But both circle the same thing: what happens when meaning slips or breaks apart entirely. Metahaven’s exhibition centres on their new film The Feeling Sonnets (Transitional Object), inspired by poems from Eugene Ostashevsky’s book. The film follows a character named ONE who discovers Ostashevsky’s poetry while interacting with an AI assistant. By contrasting AI’s mathematical approach with poetry’s problem-solving nature, Metahaven highlights the tensions between predictability and unpredictability in language.

Where AI relies on breaking down words into tokens and predicting what comes next, poetry resists these patterns. To visualise this breakdown of meaning within our language, the art collective used palindromes – words, phrases and sequences that read the same forward as backwards –  represented by fruit in the cinematic shots. “When we asked AI to create palindromes around sentences from Eugene Ostashevsky’s poetry, it returned many outputs that weren’t palindromes but just resembled them a bit,” explains METAHAVEN. Essentially, while AI has grown good at prediction, poetry plays with languadge in ways that go beyond probability.

Down the road, Eddie Peake’s Death Rattle took a different route into the breakdown of meaning, through bodies, memory and desire. The works were housed inside Slakenhuis, a towering architectural intervention, slicing through the gallery stories and turning the basement into a pitch-black maze. Speaking on his show, Peake explains, “I like to think of Slakenhuis as a violent monolith imposing itself on the TICK TACK space, much like identity imposes itself on us. It has a blunt, phallic quality. The paintings on the ground floor explore identity and sexuality through complex, psychological scenes. Meanwhile, the works on the top floor, the orange peel portrait of my daughter as a fetus and oil paintings on book pages, feel more innocent. They carry sadness, quiet beauty, joy and nostalgia, which is why they have a peaceful place in the upper echelon of the gallery.”

Throughout the space, a recording of Peake’s work The Pervert Soliloquy fills the space, a piece where a distorted voice moves between vulnerability and aggression. “The words spoken in the piece,” Peake says, “are at times vulnerable and others aggressive, but as a whole convey the inner thoughts around sex, sexuality, identity, memory and indeed desire and the inevitable shame that accompanies it.” 

Though their approaches couldn’t be more distinct, both Eddie Peake and Metahaven hope their work resonates long after the public’s visit to the gallery. Peake describes his exhibitions as “a bit like a very intense novel with multiple plot lines that converge at surprising moments,” aiming to induce a “hyper self-awareness” that simultaneously allows the viewer to lose themself. Meanwhile, Metahaven invites audiences to engage with the fragmented and shifting nature of language and meaning. Together, these works challenge us to reflect on how meaning is created, lost and reshaped in many forms.

The Feeling Sonnets (Transitional Object) ran from May 29 - June 1 2025 and Fourth Wall Death Rattle will be on display from May 30 - July 12 2025.