Marijke De Roover, Queer Feminist Artist and ‘Meme Connoisseur’, Dies at 36

Belgian artist Marijke De Roover, whose exuberant performances collided queer and feminist theory with karaoke, memes, Disney films and romantic cliché, died in Ghent on 25 July 2026. She was 36.

Her family has taken responsibility for her artistic estate, supported by a recently launched €10,000 crowdfunding campaign created by her community to begin cataloguing her work, developing an archive and keeping it accessible. Circulated by Upstream Gallery under the characteristically musical title Do You Hear the People Sing?, the appeal turns the preservation of De Roover’s work into another collective undertaking—one intended to keep it, in the gallery’s words, “alive, in conversation”.

A text accompanying the appeal reads: “With wit, humour and remarkable generosity, her artistic work explored love, romance, the nuclear family, feminism, motherhood, the ethics of reproduction, and compulsory heteronormativity under late capitalism. She made work that was so funny and at the same time incisive, leaving a lasting mark on contemporary art and on feminist and LGBTQIA+ communities.”

De Roover, who once described herself as a “part-time professional karaoke singer and meme connoisseur”, drew explicitly upon feminist and queer theory but remained suspicious of the idea that intellectual seriousness required solemnity. “I want to speak not only to the so-called art elite,” she said in a 2021 interview, emphasising the importance of accessibility.

Although De Roover exhibited increasingly widely within European contemporary-art institutions—including The Pompidou Centre in Paris and The Museum of Contemporary Art Antwerp—her performances frequently loosened the distinction between artwork and social gathering, performer and audience, critical argument and entertainment. The response to the artist’s death also gives some indication of the place she occupied beyond her exhibition record. 

Just two weeks before her death, De Roover had been at Arcade in London hosting Pride Speech Karaoke, an open evening at which participants could take to the microphone with a queer speech, poem, lyric or text of their own choosing. On 1 August, one week after her death, UNI—an Antwerp Pride group exhibition in which she had been due to participate—opened at Annie Gentils Gallery and was dedicated to her memory. A commemoration, You & Her, is scheduled at the Ghent-based contemporary art space Kiosk on 29 August.

Born in Malle, Belgium, in 1990, De Roover studied at KASK School of Arts and later HISK in Ghent. Her early works treated identity as something culturally rehearsed rather than privately possessed, moving between American electoral politics, Mormonism, internet self-fashioning, wellness culture and religion.

In 2019, De Roover drew wider attention with her operatic performance Live, Laugh, Limerence (2019–2020), first presented during London’s Frieze Week at a David Roberts Art Foundation event at Ministry of Sound. Appearing amid pink tulle, musical quotations and theatrical declarations of romantic distress, the artist turned unrequited love into an investigation of the heterosexual conventions through which popular culture teaches people how intimacy is supposed to feel. 

Her work subsequently appeared at institutions including EMST in Athens, BOZAR in Brussels and Museum für Neue Kunst Freiburg. Yet De Roover’s significance was particularly pronounced within the smaller queer and artist-run networks connecting Ghent, Brussels, Antwerp, Amsterdam and London. 

Her final solo exhibition, Silence, Third Wave Feminist. A Misandrist Is Talking, closed at Upstream Gallery in Amsterdam on 11 July 2026.