TICK TACK opens The Illegal Club: a new permanent space for sound and performance in the former bomb shelter of The Sundial, Léon Stynen's Brutalist landmark of 1955.

The Illegal Club launches with “Pressure Chamber”, the shelter's sound installation by Nik Nowak (1981, Mainz). The Berlin-based artist has built sound systems as sculptures, tracing how amplified sound has served as weapon, propaganda, armour and cultural catalyst, from the loudspeaker war across the Berlin Wall to the sound systems of Jamaica's 1970s elections and their afterlives around the world.

For its opening, The Illegal Club extends from the shelter to the entire building. On the ground floor and mezzanine, more than 50 artists living and working in Belgium each show a studio work made off the record: an experiment, an early work, a sidetrack from the main line of a practice. 

The Illegal Club: Pressure Chamber
When activated, The Illegal Club becomes a temporary autonomous zone: a black box inside the system, where formal structures of control loosen and power is negotiated differently. Across Europe, independent clubs and self-organised spaces are closing under rising rents, redevelopment and ever tighter regulation. The Illegal Club moves the other way.

Nowak’s Pressure Chamber stays. Between exhibitions and during them, artists are invited to activate it at close range, with any sonic practice: from experimental sound art to music, from listening sessions and performance to DJ sets and live acts. The programme is deliberately flexible and can extend an exhibition upstairs or stand entirely apart from it. The shelter becomes a shelter again: for artists and for what has less and less room elsewhere.

The Illegal Club is the second permanent layer TICK TACK has added to the building. Since 2019, CINEMA TICK TACK has screened moving image on the façade nightly, from sunset to sunrise. The Illegal Club adds a dedicated space for sound and performance below ground.

Nik Nowak
Since Mobile Booster (2005), Nik Nowak has developed mobile sound systems that function simultaneously as sculptures, instruments and tools of resistance. He understands the loudspeaker both as an instrument of power and as a means of emancipation. His research spans the acoustic proxy wars of the Cold War, including the so-called 'Loudspeaker War' in Berlin during the 1960s, and the more recent Sound Horeg culture of East Java. There, self-built sound systems travel from village to village on trucks and boats, a form of resistance by the rural communities of the Malang region to the affluent cities around them. The former led to Schizo Sonics (KINDL, Berlin, 2020–21) and the audio essay A War of Decibels (Flatlines/Hyperdub, 2023); the latter to Hunting a Ghost (Konschthal Esch, 2026). His machines are made to be played, activated, and inhabited: Panzer (2011) has been taken into the street to protest arms exports and the loss of affordable space for culture, and faced The Mantis across a fence at CTM Festival in Halle am Berghain. Artists such as The Bug, Kode9, Ikonika, DJ Spinn, Scratcha DVA and the late DJ Rashad have performed on his systems. The idea of the sound system as a social hub, pushed to its limit in The Sound of the Multitude (2023), continues in The Illegal Club.

The Illegal Club: Unseen sidetracks by over 50 Belgium-based artists
On the occasion of The Illegal Club's opening, TICK TACK invites more than fifty artists living and working in Belgium to each show one studio work made off the record, away from the pressure of exhibition and market: a work that has never been exhibited and never had to prove anything. Tests and early works, pieces made for a friend or for no one in particular, ideas followed simply to see where they would lead: this is what stays behind in the studio when the exhibition leaves.

They show the freedom before the signature, the moment an idea could still have gone anywhere. Set apart from an artist's main output, they are detours rather than statements. Not the record, but everything that happened around it.
The exhibition opens the part of the studio that is rarely shown, and lets it stand on its own.

It is a deliberate turn inward. TICK TACK's programme has largely looked outward, toward international artists and exhibitions. This presentation is built entirely around the scene on its own doorstep.
The format takes its cue from 'B-Sides', a show British artist Hannah Perry staged at Calcio, an artist-run space in South Bermondsey, London.

Opening Friday 9 October, 19:00-00:00
TICK TACK, Antwerp
Artists and programme revealed inside.