When you enter the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp through Mutsaardtstraat, you encounter a collection of buildings deeply rooted in history — like a natural sedimentation, layered and accumulated over time.

Here you’ll find a former Franciscan monastery surrounded by studios, some of which date back to the early nineteenth century, when the monastery was repurposed into the Academy and temporarily, for ninety years, housed the Museum of Fine Arts.

B E W A R E N (to preserve) is a word we consciously carry with us. This exhibition is framed as both an action and a responsibility. Students pass through an educational institution, yet their departure does not mark an absence. What remains are traces in the ateliers, in shared methodologies, in ways of working and questioning that continue to shape the space and its pedagogical culture.

The selected jewellery artists engage the medium through diverse yet interconnected positions. Their works address issues like feminist perspectives, the reactivation of existing objects, interrogations of labor, critical reflections on the medium itself, and other current approaches that enter into an ongoing dialogue.

In this sense, B E W A R E N proposes tradition not as something to be protected, but as a remaining relation to be actively cared for and continuously transformed. It is an invitation to engage with history as a living material, one that continues to unfold beyond the walls of the Royal Academy, carried forward by those who once passed through it.