The Perpetual Tapestry
Simone Hooymans
11.9.–15.11.2026
A bee moves through a tapestry in a process of continuous becoming.
The Perpetual Tapestry by Simone Hooymans is a multichannel animation with a living and transforming textile landscape. Threads are pulled, gathered and woven together, while other parts of the image unravel. The bees move through the landscape and intervene in what is taking place. This movement is both captivating and unsettling – the grotesque and the beautiful exist side by side, and nothing within the image seems to remain intact. The tapestry thus becomes not an image of a stable world, but of a world in flux.
The bee is the protagonist of the work. Not as an individual hero, but as part of a collective labour that never seems capable of reaching completion. It moves through a whole it cannot comprehend. Each individual action is small, yet forms part of a larger system. What is repaired in one place may simultaneously begin to unravel somewhere else.
Within this movement, a particular experience of time emerges. Past, present and what is yet to happen exist simultaneously within the tapestry. History does not appear as a linear movement towards a particular destination, but as something that continually returns, shifts and is woven anew.
The animation is presented on a loop – we enter a movement that is already underway, and leave while it continues. What might appear to be an ending becomes the beginning of a new cycle. In this way, the mode of presentation itself becomes part of the work’s investigation of repetition, decay and reconstruction.
In the development of The Perpetual Tapestry, medieval tapestry has been an important point of reference, particularly The Apocalypse Tapestry in Angers. This monumental textile was produced in the late fourteenth century and is based on the Book of Revelation. At the same time, it is inseparable from its own historical moment, a period marked by war, disease and social unrest. The biblical apocalypse thus also became a way of giving form to a contemporary experience of uncertainty and impending catastrophe. Hooymans reactivates this connection between historical imagery and contemporary experience. The medieval tapestry becomes not merely an art historical reference, but a structure that can be woven anew.
Animation is central to how this visual world comes into being. Where the historical tapestry is bound to a physical material and a fixed moment, animation allows the image itself to remain in motion. Hooymans thus shifts the original logic of the tapestry: what was once narrated through a sequence of fixed scenes becomes a world that continuously shifts before us. Threads can be pulled, the image can unravel, and new connections can emerge. Time no longer exists only within the narrative, but becomes part of the image itself.
Our own time, too, is surrounded by apocalyptic imagery. War, disease, climate crisis and ecological collapse reach us not as isolated events, but as a continuous stream of images, warnings and information. Catastrophe no longer necessarily appears as a single event yet to come, but as something we already find ourselves within. What does it do to our understanding of time when what might once have been understood as an impending catastrophe is experienced instead as a condition we continuously inhabit? In Hooymans’ work, the apocalypse is therefore not primarily an image of the end of the world. It becomes a way of examining how we attempt to orient ourselves within a world where collapse and reconstruction exist simultaneously.
This also connects to Hooymans’ wider artistic practice, in which nature, organisms and human experience form part of larger cycles. The non-human is not merely a backdrop to human history, but an active and integral part of it. It does not observe collapse from a distance, but works within it.
Perhaps this is what makes the bee an ambiguous protagonist: It can be read as a figure of human endurance, collective action, or our recurring desire to repair what we are also contributing to breaking apart. But it can also be understood in other ways – the bee is not assigned a single meaning.
The same is true of the tapestry. It can be history, nature, human civilisation, or the very attempt to understand the connections of which we are a part. The threads carry traces of what has been, while continually being drawn into something new. It is impossible to know whether the tapestry is being repaired, or whether it is simply beginning to unravel once again. The work’s unease might lie here, in the possibility that change is possible, while nothing guarantees that the next cycle will be different from the one before it.
But there is also a fragile form of hope in this. Not necessarily the hope that catastrophe can be avoided, or that history is moving towards a better place. Rather, hope lies in the possibility of weaving anew – that a thread can be pulled back, a structure shifted, and an image emerging differently. The Perpetual Tapestry offers no conclusion to this movement. The loop continues. The bee continues to work its way through the tapestry as the image keeps changing.
Whether what we are witnessing is a beginning, a repetition or a repair remains unresolved.
Simone Hooymans is an animation artist whose work transforms watercolour drawings into immersive, living environments. Through animation, she develops a critical voice on climate change, contemporary global politics and humanity’s relationship with nature. Her work has been exhibited internationally at festivals and exhibitions including Ars Electronica, the Netherlands Film Festival and the Beijing Short Film Festival, as well as in exhibitions and film festivals across Europe, Asia and the United States. Her animations have been shown at Norway’s Statens Høstutstilling and Vestlandsutstillingen.
Curated by Malin Barth