Adèle Sweetlove

ADÈLE SWEETLOVE

adelesweetlove@hotmail.com
+32471673677
Instagram

Adèle Sweetlove (b. 2000, Belgium) is a visual artist and graphic designer, currently based in Brussels. Her work is site-responsive, shaped by the rhythms, energies, and histories of place. Her practice unfolds at the intersection of digital culture and physical presence. Moving between different media, she explores the hidden infrastructures of the digital world and translates them into tactile, physical forms. In contrast to the speed and abstraction of technology, she seeks slowness, attention, and intimacy. Through this, her practice critically reflects on visibility, ownership, and the entanglement of digital systems with our lived reality.

Since 2025, Adèle has been a member of Kassé Collective, a group of artists and designers. The collective was given the opportunity to transform a Brussels townhouse into a centre of creativity and complete freedom. With this building, Kassé Collective provides artists and creatives with a space to showcase their work and contribute to sustaining Brussels’ cultural sector.

Adèle’s work ‘This Username Is Already In Use’
(2025) was recently featured in Metropolis M
Magazine issue n° 4 (august - september 2025).

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Exhibitions

‘How Many Edges Has A Place?’ at Agnes Offshore Gallery, curation by W.I.P. Collective & Agnes Offshore Gallery,
Brussels(BE)
2025

‘A Museum With No Entry’ at Zsenne Artlab,
oranised by Veduta & Hotel Carrousel
curation by Lupe Arens,
Brussels(BE)
2025

‘Graduation Show 2025’ at LUCA School of Arts,
Brussels(BE)
2025

‘ALAIN’ at Boulevard Barthélémy,
organised by Rosco Tas, Niel Schuerman & Lou Van Hende,
Brussels
2024

‘From Tower to Townhouse’ at Rue Lambert Crickx,
Brussels
2024

‘Coming Soon to Botanic Tower’ at Rue Lambert Crickx,
in collaboration with Iana De Rop & Adèle Sweetlove,
organised by Laurent Dupont, Brussels,
2024

‘Le Matin’ at LaVallée,
Brussels
2023

‘Fashion Revolution 2023’
at Parlor Offspace,
organised by Fashion Revolution, Priscilla Nollé & Emma Sweetlove,
Ghent
2023

‘Leda Collective: prelude’ at Broei,organised by Erykah Evbuomwan & Leda Collective,
Ghent
2022

’Van Eyck Kosmopoliet at St. James’ Church,
organised by Stad Gent & Design for Impact, in collaboration with OKAN, Renée Van Leuven, Adèle Sweetlove & Temene Tomson
2021

Press

The work ‘This Username Is Already In Use’(2025) was recently featured in Metropolis M Magazine issue n° 4 (august - september 2025).

Education

Master in Fine Arts
LUCA School of Arts (Brussels)
Supervisors Aglaia Konrad & Ans Mertens
2024 — 2025

Bachelor in Fine Arts
LUCA School of Arts (Brussels)
2022 — 2024

Textile Design
LUCA School of Arts (Ghent)
2021 — 2022

Bachelor in Visual Design (Graphic Design)
LUCA School of Arts (Ghent)
2019 — 2021

Internships

Pizza Gallery, Antwerp & Ghent (BE)
2025

production assistant at 019 & Kunsthal Gent(BE)
2024

Paule Josephe, Brussegem & Brussels(BE)
2021

WORK

This Username Is Already In Use (2025)

videoinstallation, steel, stained glass
220 x 48 x 220 cm
9’25’’

There is something radical in the work of Adèle Sweetlove, something that resonates with well-known avant-garde traditions, yet takes shape through the most contemporary lens. For the work ‘This Username Is Already In Use’ (2025), she downloaded all available data that applications had stored about her -a right enshrined in the GDPR legislation of 2018. Using this digital self-portrait as a souce, she asked AI sources to create a character. The resulting identity is fragmented and layered, intimate, at times generic.

In a video, an artificial voice describes the generated personality, while Sweetlove plays an unspoken game against herself. She switches roles, as both protagonist and antagonist, at a kind of checkboard, where she slides pieces of glass across a larger stained-glass window in light-and dark green. The act is one of introspection: she analyzes her own steps, choices, and doubts.

The setting is her grandfather’s studio, where he taught her the stained-glass technique. In this way, a dialogue arises between craftsmanship and artificial intelligence, between family history and digital projection.

‘This Username Is Already In Use’ (2025) also includes a stained-glass construction, a stage that cannot be stepped on, embodying the fragility of thought and the delicate nature of online presence. At the same time, Sweetlove raises questions that go beyond the character she (and AI) created. What is the impact of the often euphoric language used by chatbots? What does it mean that digital personalities can, in theory, exist forever, detached from the bodies that generated them? The stage seems set for this “state of constant visibility in which we ourselves also actively participate.”

— text written by art historian Sander Bortier for Metropolis M issue n° 04 (aug - sep 2025)

I Shall be Late! (2024)

videoinstallation, steel, stained glass,
chalk paper, pingpong ball
50 x 50 cm each
13’55’’

Three videos played simultaneously within an installation made out of stained glass, accompanied by sound and by text.

In the old tale of Alice in Wonderland, Alice follows a white rabbit out of curiosity to its rabbit hole. Eventually Alice falls into the rabbit hole and ends up into an absurd dream world. Today, ‘rabbit holes’ describe virtual spaces designed to captivate and hold our attention, drawing us in with constant, rapid stimuli. Like their namesake, they pull us deeper, blurring our sense of time and making it harder to disconnect.

The way a rabbit hole behaves reminded Adèle Sweetlove of the motion-sensor light in her apartment haway. In most of these buildings there’s a light that activates when we enter a room, responding to our movement and presence in the space. The light stays on as long as we’re moving, fading only when we leave the room.

Server Rack (2024)

server rack, steel, glass, red wine, white wine
213 x 80 x 90 cm

A collaboration between Adèle Sweetlove and Iana De Rop created during their residency week in March 2024 in Anderlecht, Brussels. This week was led by artist Laurent Dupont.

While visiting the old Glico building in Anderlecht, Sweetlove and De Rop came across this rack. It was orginally designed to function as a server rack for data storage.

‘Server Rack’ (2024) is a work that embodies both stillness and motion. Visitors become participants in the performance by taking a glass and filling it with their choice of red or white wine. There’s a tradition of serving drinks at vernissages, as it celebrates the opening of the exhibition and enhances a sociable atmosphere.

It’s a piece that serves its audience, redefining the vernissage itself as an integral part of the exhibition experience.

Who is serving who?

SEA-ME-WE3 (2024)

steel, watertubes, pumpes, UV-print on plexi, transparant sheets

‘SEA-ME-WE3’ (2024) is an installation about the hidden material infrastructures of the internet. It reveals how something we often imagine as abstract and weightless—“the cloud,” “data flow,” or the color blue—is in fact dependent on physical systems: undersea cables, data centers, electricity, and vast amounts of water.

At its core, the work reimagines the SEA-ME-WE3 cable, the world’s longest submarine internet cable, as a flowing water-filled tube connecting three vases. The circulating water echoes both the invisible movement of global data and the environmental cost of cooling digital servers.

By tracing the digital journey of a single photo and transforming personal data into physical weight, the work materializes the abstract into something tangible. ‘SEA-ME-WE3’ (2024) asks us to reconsider how we perceive the digital world: not as immaterial, but as deeply rooted in matter, energy, and the environment.

Motion/lessness (2023)

steel, glass, textile, water, borax

Hot Air (2023)

slide projector, steel, printed confetti, found plastic
150 x 100 x 120 cm

UNWRAPPED (2022)

steel, wool, stone, print in glass frame
21 x 29,7 cm