Exit. PXL-MAD School of Arts. MA Degree Show 2025

Artist list

Svea Finck, Sarah Nicolaï, Elisabeth Pira, Helia Talebi, Maryam Zabihi, Sareh Zarghampour

The exhibition uncovered the layered and often unexpected dialogues between jewellery, the body, and storytelling. Each piece embodied a personal narrative—marked by emotional resonance, sensory experience, and the tension that arises when private stories are made public. Through diverse techniques and materials, the students explored jewellery as an extension of the body—a medium through which identities are shaped, challenged, and reclaimed. Feminist perspectives emerged through gestures of care, resistance, and vulnerability. The jewellery reflects on how the body carries memory, tension and emotion. Visitors were invited into an intimate world where jewellery was not just worn but felt—where it became a site of connection between inner experience and outward expression.

In their graduation projects, the students explored a variety of themes. Svea Finck focuses on repetition and difference as conceptual and production-based strategies for creating political jewellery. Sarah Nicolaï explores tension as a search for a point of rest: a subtle balance that holds elements together despite opposing forces. Elisabeth Pira creates objects for two people that explore love through shared movements and live performances, showing the small, often unseen ways people connect. Helia Talebi explores how we can physically experience the restrictions of life under authoritarian regimes. Maryam Zabihi explores how taste and smell can be interpreted within conceptual jewellery design by focusing on the sensory and symbolic qualities of chocolate. Sareh Zarghampour explores the body, examines pain as an internal and invisible phenomenon, and presents it in her jewellery not as a physical reaction, but as an emotional and internal reality.

By celebrating innovation, craftspersonship and experimental research, EXIT offered an insight into the future of contemporary jewellery.

Tutors: Frederik Aerts, Nedda El-Asmar, Arne Dewinde, David Huycke, Vlad Ionescu, An Jonckers, Maria Konschake, Lore Langendries, Audi Pauwels, Anneleen Swillen, Kitty Spaenjers, Johanna van Hage , Charlotte Vanhoubroeck, Bert Willems, Karen Wuytens.


Svea Finck
On Repeat
On Repeat is an artistic exploration of repetition and difference as conceptual strategies for conveying political messages through jewellery. The project comprises five distinct pieces, each engaging with repetition and difference both as formal techniques and as philosophical approaches. Grounded in these conceptual frameworks, each work articulates a feminist perspective, inviting both the viewer and the wearer to reflect, engage, and respond. Through this interplay of form, theory, and personal experience, On Repeat challenges conventional narratives and opens space for dialogue around gender, identity, and power.


Sarah Nicolaï
IN-SPANNING
IN-SPANNING explores tension in art and design as a search for a resting point: a subtle balance that holds elements together despite opposing forces. It’s a game between balance and imbalance, culminating in the moment when everything merges into a harmonious whole. Through experimenting with materials under physical pressure, a unique material vocabulary emerged. The jewellery invites the wearer to engage with this field of tension — becoming an active participant who makes the invisible tangible. The paradoxical result: an invisible force becomes visible again through intense tangibility, creating peace by finding balance within contradiction.


Elisabeth Pira
WIJ, een daad van liefde (US, an act of love)
WIJ is a series of five body-related objects that exist in the intimate space between two bodies. Each piece is created to be worn by two people, inviting them into shared gestures and movements that both restrict and reveal, evoking the quiet rituals of closeness.
These objects are a physical translations of everyday exchanges between two people who love each other deeply. They make visible the invisible choreography of intimacy: the pauses, tensions and silent understandings.
The project culminates in a live performance that traces the emotional connection underlying these relationships. In recognition of the fluid, evolving nature of love, the performance is never recorded, only witnessed. Each iteration is unique, shaped by the moment and the people inhabiting it.


Helia Talebi
The Seven Trials of Freedom
The Seven Trials of Freedom is a collection of seven jewellery pieces that express what it feels like to live under an authoritarian regime. Each piece embodies a form of restriction, censorship, silence, and control, turning invisible oppression into a physical experience. Through the body, these works transform limitation into presence and resistance into a daily protest.


Maryam Zabihi
Chocolate Box
Chocolate Box blends taste and smell in a multisensory experience. Created in collaboration with Boon Chocoladehuis Hasselt, the project explores desire and anticipation through jewellery. Each chocolate cube must be eaten to uncover a hidden ring, a fast craving turned into a lasting object, sealing memory in what’s consumed and what remains.


Sareh Zarghampour
Site of sensation
This project explores physical pain as an indescribable, deeply personal experience. Since language often fails to express pain, the collection uses jewellery to reflect its unique, internal nature. Inspired by the body as both the source and site of pain, it presents pain not just as a physical reaction, but as an emotional, inner reality.