Thomas De Ben (BE. °1988) is a Belgium-based artist, curator and creative practitioner, living and working in Antwerp.

With a background in visual arts (KASK, Ghent) and roots in skate and street culture, he develops a hybrid practice at the threshold of art, design and technology. He works both autonomously and within self-initiated or co-initiated formations such as PLUS‑ONE Projects and A.P./Studio, where he combines gallery expertise, artistic development and ways of thinking from the creative industry into future-oriented formats for artistic production and presentation.

At the core of his autonomous individual work lies the question of how people construct identities, communities and myths between physical and digital space. Skateboarding shaped at an early stage his understanding of risk, collaboration and public space: the broken skateboard truck from a filmed fall, which also fractured his collarbone, becomes a “Memento Mori” in which the bent metal and the paused video frame mirror each other as a sculptural drawing of impact and vulnerability. This logic reappears in autobiographical works around a violent attack in which his teeth were knocked out: dental casts engraved with time and date, “WHAT IF” portraits of well-known figures with his damaged mouth, and a live TV performance in which he removes his dentures while announcing a Rihanna song. In this way, trauma shifts to a strange intersection of confession, (media) critique and humour.

Drawing is a recurring medium and a way of thinking. De Ben uses colour pencil, a naive material associated with childhood, to render sexual symbols with obsessive precision, such as repeated depictions of a phallus. The tension between childish subject matter and painstaking execution creates an uneasy friction: at once funny and intimate, crude and tender, ironic and sincere. This aligns with his broader interest in “low” iconography, doodles, stickers, T‑shirts, meme-like slogans, which he approaches with the same conceptual care as institutional art.

Thanks to a background in graphic design, communication and print, his practice is strongly influenced by text and image-driven formats, with particular attention to language, typography, popular visual culture and psychological undercurrents. Language and distribution are crucial in his work. Under the fictional label “WAE: We Are Equal”, he created T‑shirts with direct, circular slogans such as “Girls are boys with a vagina” and “Boys are girls with a penis”, and designed a “flag of humanity” in which elements from different regions and gender symbols converge. These works function at once as banal wordplay and as direct statements on equality, exposing the absurdity of ongoing discrimination (and the harm in our world) despite our fundamental similarity. For De Ben, these formats matter because they are democratic: T‑shirts, stickers and flags circulate outside art institutions and turn the work into a mobile, accessible surface system for ideas.

His interest in accessible, experimental “folk art” was further shaped by years of collaboration with cirQ vzw, the Ghent-based creative production laboratory known for absurdist, socially engaged live acts at festivals and in public space. With cirQ, he co-developed and realised concept-driven theatre and participatory projects, learning to think in terms of situations rather than objects, publics rather than spectators, and collective authorship rather than singular genius. That attitude continues in projects such as the touring screen-print “sweatshop” “Tour from Hell”, in which refugees become the protagonists on their own tour shirts, or in the Antwerp gallery and project platform PLUS‑ONE Projects, which functions as a framework for contributions by other artists, such as InstroomArt, the social-artistic project led by artist Nico Dockx and chef Seppe Nobels.

De Ben’s practice is deliberately hybrid: he moves between commissioned projects, autonomous art, collaborative constellations and curatorial platforms. Since 2011 he has been active as an autonomous artist, alongside initiatives such as FBS Studio (a collective of creative practitioners), cirQ vzw (social-artistic production laboratory), Refu Interim (Compagnie Cordial, a refugee employment agency), Diana Boys (artistic screen-print studio), Ship of Fools (collective of creative practitioners), Never Forget Tomorrow (R&D web3 art start-up) and WEB32 (technology event), which connect visual art, graphic and spatial design, concept development and curation, live performance, production, web3 technology and innovation contexts. His experience within innovative environments such as Cronos Groep and WEB32 has sharpened his understanding of how technology, platform logics and economies shape cultural production, knowledge he feeds back into his artistic and curatorial work.

As co-initiator of PLUS‑ONE Projects and A.P./Studio, as curator for BADAFF and member of the DesignUndisciplined (Artecetera) think tank, De Ben develops curated exhibitions and projects, productions, art integrations and collaborations that function as expanded artworks in their own right. He designs spatial narratives, guides and co-produces new creations and builds trajectories for young and mid-career artists, often at the intersection of art, design, brand collaborations and new media. The gallery, fair or event is not a mere marketplace here, but a testing ground for new formats that are more porous, collaborative and responsive to social and technological shifts.

Conceptually, his individual work is nourished by post-internet sensibilities. De Ben is fascinated by the hybrid zone where online performance and image circulation blend with lived experience: the tension between who you are, who you perform as, and how others frame you. Projects such as “Make Me Dance”, an early online performance platform in which he handed his body over to digital instructions during the rise of social media self-exploitation, anticipate a broader culture of shameless self-promotion and algorithmic visibility.

Visually, his output ranges from detailed pencil drawings and digital collages to flags, T‑shirts, stickers, installations, posters and spatial designs. One example is a digital collage of an enraged Britney Spears with mouths for eyes, in which a celebrity breakdown is pushed into an almost monstrous caricature of public consumption. Another example is the sticker “How not to be an asshole”, in which a smiling sun can also be read as a veined anus: a compact illustration of his interest in forms that are both cute and obscene, disarming and confrontational. In collaboration with musicians, he developed artwork for underground electronic music, aligning his visual language with subcultural sound and club contexts.

Across these different forms and contexts, several constants return: an ethics of equality and care, an attraction to absurdity and self-relativisation, and a strong belief in collaboration as an artistic method. De Ben consciously seeks out “friction zones” where artistic, technological and social languages intersect and generate new narratives, rather than reproducing existing binaries such as online/offline or artist/curator. His practice is content-led and responsive to the urgencies of the present, yet remains grounded in the concrete: bodies, objects, images, slogans, jokes, flags, and more.

For De Ben, art is not a separate domain but a way of inhabiting the world and building structures, from individual works to long-term platforms, that enable others to experiment, fail, connect and rethink themselves. This long-term, structural engagement with the field, through both autonomous work and collaborative initiatives, underpins his position as a contemporary artist and creative practitioner within the Belgian and international landscape.