Auction Dead Darlings XX

Dead Darlings is thrilled to mark their 20th anniversary with a special exhibition and auction in collaboration with W139.

Come celebrate an auction event like no other! Two rounds of bidding, with food, drinks, performances, and plenty of surprises. Stay for the whole thing — or drop in whenever you like!

All sales are anonymous — artists’ names are revealed only after each work is sold! Our 20th edition celebrates community, creativity, and collaboration.

Programme
Doors — 12:00
Auction — 16:00–21:00

Free entrance
Register for a paddle: € 2

Dead Darlings began in 2005 as a subversive, anonymous art auction in Amsterdam. It has since grown into an international platform with a mission to explore the often fraught, always complex relationship between the price and the value of an artwork, focusing on dead darlings—works an artist has created but never brought to light. Inspired by “kill your darlings,” they ask: what becomes of these ambivalent works.

Opening Dead Darlings XX — In It Together

Dead Darlings is thrilled to mark their 20th anniversary with a special exhibition and auction in collaboration with W139. You are invited to join us in celebrating this milestone with the grand opening of Dead Darlings XX — In It Together!

Dead Darlings XX — In It Together is a two-week exhibition, including over eighty artworks, happenings, a plethora of archival materials and an extended auction event. We can’t wait to share with you what has been twenty years of fun, surprises, commitment, creativity and hard work. 

Join us for drinks, a special cocktail, and a relaxed preview of the works. Come explore 80+ artworks and archival treasures from two decades of Dead Darlings. Sign up for the auction, buy your catalogue, check out our amazing new merch, and rub shoulders with Darlings!

Programme
Opening Dead Darlings XX — In It Together
— Friday 28 November 2025

The Auction
— Saturday 13 December 2025

Dead Darlings began in 2005 as a subversive, anonymous art auction in Amsterdam. It has since grown into an international platform with a mission to explore the often fraught, always complex relationship between the price and the value of an artwork, focusing on dead darlings—works an artist has created but never brought to light. Inspired by “kill your darlings,” they ask: what becomes of these ambivalent works.

Para-siting: phANTASMAL HAIRSALON

phANTASMAL HAIRSALON is a multidisciplinary art exhibition and performance choreographed by Raoni Muzho Saleh in co-creation with Karin Iturralde Nurnberg. W139 will transform into a campy, draggy hair salon where members of the public—the Clients—undergo a fabulous (or fabulously wrong) performative hair transformation by wearing a sculptural hairstyle while the rest of the public watches the performance.

Book an appointment, get crowned with a sculptural hairdo by the Hairstylist—a shady yet passionate character—and then strut it outside. Wearing our avant-garde, fabulous hair-do (or hair-don’t), you turn the streets into a campy moving exhibition and a cheeky drag protest against a sterilized world. phANTASMAL HAIRSALON aims to bring back, albeit momentarily, the old days when uncanny, colorful figures would prance the streets proudly. Be aware that there is no cutting involved—but a revival of look and spirit is guaranteed.

phANTASMAL HAIRSALON opening days
— Friday 21 November
— Sunday 23 November
— Wednesday 17 December
— Friday 19 December

Opening hours will be announced soon.

Raoni/Muzho Saleh is a Hazara/Dutch artist using performance, installation and the sound of mourning and moaning to twist and reshape narratives of (cultural) becoming. His work’s focus is to play with the personal, social and political edges. Imbuing his love for art, with body, spirit and politics through movement, voice and textile, he creates temporary immersions into Otherworldly feeling, relations and thought.

Karin Iturralde Nurnberg is an artist working with storytelling in multidisciplinary and sculptural installations. She is born and raised in Ecuador and lives and works in Amsterdam. In her practice she embraces improvisation and the power of spontaneous performative and sculptural interventions, to re-arrange the world around her and shift weighted positions.

Ash Above, Show Below — Finissage

Join us for the finissage of Temper Tantrum Bonehouse, a ritual of goodbye with a performative guided tour through the exhibition by Mette Sterre. This is the very last opportunity to still physically visit the Bonehouse, one final time before it slips into memory and lingers only in weary minds. This finissage is both a farewell and a transformation: a memorial where the end becomes a new beginning, where the Bonehouse, like the Ouroboros, sheds its skin to become something else.

Expect murmurs of melancholy, reflections spoken aloud, and resuscitation after the Dutch elections. But mostly: expect a final activation of the Bonehouse—a last gesture by Mette Sterre, bringing the Bonehouse to life once more before it self-dissolves and goes up in smoke forever.

Doors — 17:00
Performative guided tour — 17:30
Drinks — 18:30

Tickets available at the door.
Admission fee: €5

Mette Sterre is a visual artist who investigates the limits and transformative potential of the body. Her work resists categorization, fusing performance, sculpture, body masks, and digital technology into immersive, otherworldly environments that explore the threshold between the organic and the artificial. By entering her work we are cast into the materialisation of her mind processes: a sensorial and embodied experience.

FLUSH #8: Frontera Amarilla

Faced with the tedium of patients who, time and again, return to receive a treatment that remains perpetual; with the side effects endured by some people living with HIV in Latin America due to low-cost medication, the privileges and restrictions in access, the logic of the pharmaceutical market, or the difficulties of migrating with HIV—Los Amarillos (a self-organized artistic collective from Colombia) propose and construct images that embody the demand, the desire, and the sacredness of bodies living with the virus.

The relationship with it becomes language and affective resistance—intimate yet collective, poetic proclamations that invite us to think of HIV not as an illness, but as a political symptom.

It’s about diagnosing utopias, to keep dreaming of a moving revolution. This room does not heal: it burns.

Colectivo Los Amarillos has carried out exhibitions, research, performances, and creative writing laboratories during the autumn of this year in several European cities as part of Frontera Amarilla, and now arrives in Amsterdam to open a space for denunciation, memory, and the celebration of dissident bodies.

Programme
Opening FLUSH #8: FRONTERA AMARILLA (at W139)
— Saturday 8 November, 19:00-22:00

Workshop with Colective Los Amarillos
— Monday 10 November, 18:30-20:30

Artist talk with Colective Los Amarillos (at Rietveld Academie)
— Thursday 13 November, 17:00-19:00

Production: Espacio Estamos Bien
Graphic design: Dun Lee
Text: Lou Vives

With the support of Monstrous Futurities, Romany Dear, and Kyle Tryhorn.

FLUSH is a flourishing collaboration between Espacio Estamos Bien and W139, located in the toilets of W139. FLUSH operates as a flexible form of organizing and creating, enabling various types of collaboration. FLUSH aims to foster inter-local relationships, viewing Amsterdam as a hub for facilitating diverse interactions and building connections that bridge distances. Joyful, friendly and decentralized connections extend beyond the Amsterdam art scene.

DNK Amsterdam Experimental Music Festival Weekend — Day 2

DNK Amsterdam invites you to a participatory performance on Beursplein. The Social Music Club plays To Cast A Net… by Koen Nutters: a group piece for sine tones in the public space.

To Cast A Net… is a piece that asks performers to gather and create an electronic net, cast over the auditory reality of everyday life, by simply playing one electronic tone of a particular height on each on their phones, and thereby augmenting and highlighting the public space we are occupying. 

The tones will create subtle beatings with each other and with sounds in the environment while performers slowly switch places, and form a moment and place for intensified listening to the world while abiding in the open city for a performative pause, a moment to reflect on the use and function of public space, society as a whole, and our place in it, as people, artists, and sounding entities.

Please sign up in advance if you want to participate. Please send an email to koennutters@gmail.com
Bring an umbrella in case of rain

Start performance — 15:00
Location — Beursplein

The Social Music Club is a loose collective of musicians and non-musicians who regularly come together to listen, make sound, talk about interaction, and try different types of text scores and exercises from the book Search & Reflect: A Music Workshop Handbook, compiled by students of the late percussionist, improviser, and teacher John Stevens.

DNK Agenda

DNK Amsterdam Experimental Music Festival Weekend — Day 1

In the context of the DNK is DONE… residency DNK Amsterdam presents a concert night with two sets of cutting edge and quite classical experimental music by a quartet of young musicians based in The Hague and an ensemble of ragtag experimentalists, professionals and hobbyists alike, from the Amsterdam region aka The Social Music Club.

Programme
Saturday 22 November
Montoriol, Eckhardt, McGuire, & De Gendt — Simultaneous / Synchronous (Song)
The Social Music Club — Stones (Christian Wolff) and The Great Learning – Paragraph 7 (Cornelius Cardew)
Afterwards music by the DNK DJ team

Roc Montoriol, Jacob Eckhardt, Lawrence McGuire, Cis De Gendt are a The Hague-based quartet, sharing an interest in perception and attention in relation to presentation formats, playback media, volumes and space-time. Their work currently utilizes amplification, sound recordings, electro-acoustic devices, objects, and voice. 

For this performance at W139, they reimagine DNK ensemble’s 2017 performance: Simultaneous / Synchronous (Song) with (synthetic) voice and non-pitched sound materials layered across a range of playback devices. They take inspiration from its forming of relations, the structural repetition of re-starting and re-shifting, and the masking that occurs.

Watch a version of the original performance here.

The Social Music Club is a loose collective of musicians and non-musicians who regularly come together to listen, make sound, and talk about interaction. They try different types of text scores and exercises from the book Search & Reflect: A Music Workshop Handbook, compiled by students of the late percussionist, improviser, and teacher John Stevens.

They will perform a simultaneous performance of Christian Wolff’s Stones and Cornelius Cardew’s The Great Learning – Paragraph 7.

DNK Agenda


DNK Amsterdam Monday Night Concert #2

In the context of the Para-siting project DNK is DONE… DNK Amsterdam presents a concert night with two solo sets of cutting edge electronic music by two of the Netherland’s finest performer-composers.

Programme
Anne La Berge — Flute and electronics
Gert-Jan Prins — Electronics and percussion

Doors — 19:30
First set — 20:00

Entrance by donation

Anne La Berge’s passion for the extremes in both composed and improvised music has led her to the fringes of storytelling and sound art as her sources of musical inspiration. She performs as a multimedia soloist and in projects both live and online and is one of the composer/performers in the Amsterdam based ensemble MAZE.

In 1999, together with Steve Heather and Cor Fuhler, she founded Kraakgeluiden, an improvisation series based in Amsterdam, exploring combinations of acoustic and electronic instruments using real-time interactive performance systems. Many of the resulting musical collaborations have taken on a life beyond the Kraakgeluiden series, which ceased in 2006.

La Berge will perform Third Nature, a performance with storytelling, processed flute, synthesized and sampled audio, sirens, improvisations and other stuff. It includes parts of her compositions from 2005 to ones that are currently works-in-progress.

Gert-Jan Prins (b. 1961 in IJmuiden) focuses on the sonic and musical qualities of electronic noise and percussion, and investigates their relationship with the visual. While he started his career as a drummer, his works now include performances, sound installations, compositions, electronic circuits, and numerous collaborations with other musicians, visual artists, composers, and dancers.

DNK Agenda

DNK is DONE… hosts The Social Music Club

The Social Music Club is an initiative by Aimée Theriot and Koen Nutters. In just a few words: it is a musical improvisation session without dogmas, where the emphasis lies on meeting, and getting to know each other, while also discussing, bringing into practice, and stretching the understanding of what exactly music is, and can be. For musicians, non-musicians, amateurs, and professionals alike. 

The Social Music Club concentrates on methods for group improvisation by John Stevens and text scores from various contemporary and historical sources to play music together in a thoughtful and attentive environment.

Bring instruments, objects, words, voices, bodies. With a drink afterwards in a bar nearby.

Doors — 20:00
Start programme — 20:10

Free entrance and full participation

Organized and facilitated by Aimée Theriot and Koen Nutters.

DNK Agenda

DNK Amsterdam Monday Night Concert #1

In the context of the Para-siting project DNK is DONE… DNK Amsterdam presents a concert night with two solo sets of cutting edge electronic music by two of the Netherland’s finest performer-composers.

Programme
Danya Pilchen — Feedback systems
Rubén Patiño — Repetitive synthetic patterns

Doors — 19:30
First set — 20:00

Entrance by donation

Danya Pilchen is a composer based in The Hague. His main interest lies in the human experience of time and music’s ability to shed light on it. He has composed for a wide range of settings, including solo, ensemble, and orchestra, as well as theatre productions. A significant part of his practice involves creating immersive sound installations that incorporate instrumental performances.

Danya’s music is closely intertwined with his research into collective experiences of time in musical practices. Understanding time as an emerging property of consciousness affected by social interactions necessitates increased attention to the relationships between musicians and audiences in Danya’s pieces. To facilitate these interactions, he employs various compositional strategies and listening techniques engaging the materiality of sound.

Rubén Patiño is an artist who explores sound generated by electronic means and its potential to transform the perception of space. His practice often challenges standardized formats of presentation, blending the boundaries between concert, public event, and installation. Solo or in collaboration, Patiño’s works have been presented in museums, clubs, festivals, and galleries across Europe, America, Asia, Africa, Russia, and Australia. He has published on labels such as Anòmia, Haunter Records, Diagonal Records, The Trilogy Tapes, Where To Now?, The Death of Rave, and Gang of Ducks.

DNK Agenda