Tag: Event

The Frame Cannot Hold the Ghosts

A screening and reading programme with Komtouch Napattaloong, Kaisa Saarinen, and Bart Seng Wen Long, which extends out from the trio’s collective installation, bringing focus to their distinct yet sympathetic forms of narration and storytelling. In collaboration with the Prince Claus Fund.

Lingering within the hallowed space of the make-shift rubber tapper shelter in the main exhibition gallery, between the CRT monitor and the modern flatscreen and the stacks of anarchronistic agitprop, are persistent ghosts biding their time to re-manifest: as kinky anecdotes of a middle-aged Singaporean rubberist; a veteran camcorder on its last pixels; eccentric mythologies that have built and continue to sustain a nation’s spirit; the dreams sustained by freebleeding trees night after night.

They gather in the screening and reading programme, The Frame Cannot Hold the Ghosts, which expands on the various themes entangled within the installation, featuring three short films, an interview with a gimp, and excerpts from a hybrid nonfiction-in-progress.

This event will be held in English.

Ticket: €7,50
Student and solidarity ticket: €5

Buy your tickets via Eventbrite.

Film programme

Phi Pattana / In Sum (2026), 17 min
Corroded pixels struggle to form an image as they move through Cold War promises of development in rural Thailand, haunted by archival voices.

Emergencies (2025), 15 min
A Singaporean man mixes up two memories: one of a colonial-era propaganda film about communist insurgencies in rubber plantations, and another of his Malaysian ex-playmate.

No Exorcism Film (2024), 20 min
As one robotic voice recounts nightmarish returns to Thailand, another seeks to console.

Field Interview #2 (2025), 5 min
On the elevated walkway of Singapore’s Plantation District, a social housing estate built on top of a colonial-era rubber plantation, M. Shah hones his kickboxing drills clad in his preferred sportswear—a head-to-toe rubber suit.

All of It Transforms into Something Nobody Knows (Ongoing)
Emerging from and building on an ongoing research-based art project around rubber, All of It Transformed into Something Nobody Knows is a hybrid non-fiction book that explores the material as a commodity fetish & fetish commodity.

Komtouch Napattaloong (he/him) is a visual artist and filmmaker based in Thailand. Working across experimental, documentary, and ‘post-documentary’ cinematic forms, his practice involves identity deconstructions, migration narratives, and historical translations to examine the nature of memory, displacement, and image agency.

Kaisa Saarinen (she/her) is a Finnish researcher, poet, and novelist based in London. She writes about false dichotomies, country girls lost in the dazzle of big cities and other underdogs, strange desires and painful transformations, with particular attention to the absurd pleasures and frequent horrors of living through an ongoing apocalypse. Together with Bart Seng Wen Long, she is leading the Rubber Dreams of its Lifetime project.

Bart Seng Wen Long (he/him) is a Singaporean artist, filmmaker and curator based in London. His practice spans moving images, photography, expanded cinema and performance, revolving around confrontations between reality and fantasy, and how in the heat of such encounters, they reveal the interconnectedness of things within the political economy of desire.

Image: still from Phi Pattana / In Sum (2026) by Komtouch Napattaloong.

The residency of Komtouch Napattaloong is part of the Exchanges programme by the Prince Claus Fund, with the support of the Amsterdam City Council.

Atmospheric Witnessing

Initiating artist Lawil Karama is joined by anthropologist, artist, and curator Edward Akintola Hubbard for a conversation around Karama’s installation Algorithm of Colour, shedding light on her long-term research into the limits of representing violence and the possibilities for staging sites of memorial.

In this first event of the context programme, the audience is invited into Karama’s ongoing process, offering a view of how the ideas behind Algorithm of Colour as a computer script emerged from years of investigation into the archive of human rights violations during the Idi Amin regime (1971-1979); and why, subsequently, the script has manifested as an immersive installation that works through the notion of ‘atmospheric witnessing’ to critically fabulate a form of commemoration not yet possible for those whose lives were—and are still—affected by the violence. With ‘atmospheric witnessing,’ Karama counters conventional notions of spectatorship tethered to photographic documentation, looking, instead, to the sky itself as an actant present to Amin’s system of executions. The concept also, as Karama and Hubbard will explore, serves as a key starting point for the broader curatorial concept behind the exhibition The Nature of Remembering.

This event will be held in English.

Ticket: €7,50
Student and solidarity ticket: €5

Buy your tickets via Eventbrite.

Lawil Karama (she/her) is a Ugandan-Dutch conceptual artist born in former West Berlin and based in Amsterdam. Her work is deeply rooted in the diasporic experience, often drawing from her family history as a starting point for challenging conventional narratives and amplifying unheard voices. Karama’s creative path began in the world of special make-up effects, which continues to influence her approach, bringing a visceral understanding of form, surface, and psychological tension into her current work.

Edward Akintola Hubbard (he/him) is a Rotterdam-based artist and educator whose practice is experimental ethnography. Combining research methods from across anthropology, art theory, cinema, media studies, gender studies, urban studies, gothic studies and African diaspora studies, his work takes form through photography, video, installation, and curation. As artistic director of the DARKMATTER Collective, Hubbard is invested in creating spaces where the invisible can be made visible.

Image: Lawil Karama, Algorithm of Colour: Reflection Series – Sky 14:00 EAT, February 10, 1973 Mbale, Uganda (2026), KunstRAI X Rietveld Alumni 2026: paralelepípedo, photography by Lucia Del Valle Ramirez.

Codicil Screenings: Alex Reynolds

Codicil Screenings is a screening program that runs in the front space of the W139 until September. 2018 Every Thursday evening an artist is invited to present their work amongst other moving images of their choice. A codicil is an addition or supplement that explains, modifies or revokes a will.

On Thursday the 16th of August Alex Reynolds will present her new film, This Door, This Window. Operating as a double portrait of choreographer Alma Söderberg and drummer Nilo Gallego, the film reflects on the theme of cohabitation through sound, exploring the idea of living together as a matter of negotiating rhythms, earworms and boundaries. In addition to this, Alex will present a selection of rhyming films and recordings she loves.

m(A)ke (M)e y(O)u(U)rs: Reading Club

When the old swords are being sharpened again, MANY finds themselves—as do many more—claiming LOVE as the antidote. But what if love and relationships as we learned them, are chained to the systems of violence we want to end? How can we exit the loop by loving, caring, and desiring differently?

These are the questions that bind us to the m(A)ke (M)e y(O)u(U)rs reading club, and the desire to share them with MANY. 

MANY is kicking off the reading club with four reading sessions on love, desire, and relationships at Para-siting. MANY will especially focus on DESIRE and how to de-link it from ownership and achievement.

This event is free of charge. 

Reserve your spot here!

For more information on accessibility see Contact & Visit.

MANY is an Amsterdam-based platform that emerges with a desire to de-link knowledge and artistic production from traditional notions of authorship. During Para-siting, MANY is configured by Aion Arribas, Ainhoa Hernández Escudero, Michael Scerbo, Jiji Jizu, the W139 team and the participants of the public activities, with the support of Artists Circle.

m(A)ke (M)e y(O)u(U)rs: Reading Club

When the old swords are being sharpened again, MANY finds themselves—as do many more—claiming LOVE as the antidote. But what if love and relationships as we learned them, are chained to the systems of violence we want to end? How can we exit the loop by loving, caring, and desiring differently?

These are the questions that bind us to the m(A)ke (M)e y(O)u(U)rs reading club, and the desire to share them with MANY. 

MANY is kicking off the reading club with four reading sessions on love, desire, and relationships at Para-siting. MANY will especially focus on DESIRE and how to de-link it from ownership and achievement.

This event is free of charge. 

Reserve your spot here!

For more information on accessibility see Contact & Visit.

MANY is an Amsterdam-based platform that emerges with a desire to de-link knowledge and artistic production from traditional notions of authorship. During Para-siting, MANY is configured by Aion Arribas, Ainhoa Hernández Escudero, Michael Scerbo, Jiji Jizu, the W139 team and the participants of the public activities, with the support of Artists Circle.

m(A)ke (M)e y(O)u(U)rs: Reading Club

When the old swords are being sharpened again, MANY finds themselves—as do many more—claiming LOVE as the antidote. But what if love and relationships as we learned them, are chained to the systems of violence we want to end? How can we exit the loop by loving, caring, and desiring differently?

These are the questions that bind us to the m(A)ke (M)e y(O)u(U)rs reading club, and the desire to share them with MANY. 

MANY is kicking off the reading club with four reading sessions on love, desire, and relationships at Para-siting. MANY will especially focus on DESIRE and how to de-link it from ownership and achievement.

This event is free of charge. 

Reserve your spot here!

For more information on accessibility see Contact & Visit.

MANY is an Amsterdam-based platform that emerges with a desire to de-link knowledge and artistic production from traditional notions of authorship. During Para-siting, MANY is configured by Aion Arribas, Ainhoa Hernández Escudero, Michael Scerbo, Jiji Jizu, the W139 team and the participants of the public activities, with the support of Artists Circle.

m(A)ke (M)e y(O)u(U)rs x PUB: Live Radio Transmission

During this event the first pilot episode of m(A)ke (M)e y(O)u(R)s will air live. m(A)ke (M)e y(O)u(R)s will be a performative podcast series that explores love, desire, relationships, and the hidden infrastructures that choreograph our intimacies. For this event MANY will collaborate with PUB. 

For this event our normal ticket prices are applicable. 

Reserve your spot here!

For more information on ticket prices and accessibility, see Contact & Visit.

MANY is an Amsterdam-based platform that emerges with a desire to de-link knowledge and artistic production from traditional notions of authorship. During Para-siting, MANY is configured by Aion Arribas, Ainhoa Hernández Escudero, Michael Scerbo, Jiji Jizu, the W139 team and the participants of the public activities, with the support of Artists Circle.

after afterlives: film screening and talk programme

What does the ground unleash when it is denied keeping what it holds? How does soil get implicated in the carrying of catastrophe? And how does continuous excavation for artefacts reveal an obsession to erase history in order to create a new one? Against this erasure, how have material knowledges of burning, plastering, and burying offered different approaches to the ground—one where land and flesh are bound together in a rhythm of constant transformation? These are some of the questions we’ll be engaging with during this program, which will expand on the works of Areej Ashhab and Ola Hassanain, in the flour, water, soil exhibition, and bring in the work of Dina Mimi, to open up a conversation about the artefact as witness, the erasure of history through excavation, the objects and topologies of repair, and the relationship of people to their material environments. 

Areej will be sharing excerpts from her film Lime Through the Elements, and connecting them to her new installation, The Ground Keeps What it Holds, commissioned for this exhibition.  The work engages ancient burial practices in Palestine and the aftermath of their settler-colonial excavation. Through field research, experimentation, and collective labor, the film revisits the lost practice of lime making in Palestine and its elemental journey back to limestone as a reflection on return—what survives erasure and elimination.

We will also be screening Dina Mimi’s short film The Eyes That Never See, which narrates the story of Ram(z)i, a lonely working class man who died twice. Ram(z)i was renamed as soon as his first body died, to die again in Jerusalem, under the dusty ground while digging for artefacts from a 6,000 year-old ancient city. Just like in Areej’s work, Dina’s film exposes the obsessions of a settler state that continuously excavates, digging deep into the ground, to find artefacts in order to create new histories.  

Ola will present her spatial installation for the exhibition, Water Collection Points, and contextualise it within her ongoing project Tell The Water What The Clay Kept Secret. The work uses water collection points across the exhibition space to make visible the efforts to repair the environment that emerge at the onset of catastrophes. Framed as a site for the ‘ecology of repair’, Ola examines this collective effort to deal with crisis by highlighting roles within communities—especially those living near water—where watching and listening emerge as spatial practices shaped by environmental and political rupture. 

The films and talks will be followed by a conversation between Ola, Dina, and Areej, moderated by Margarita Osipian—interweaving their individual works and the stories that unfold through them.

Ticket: €7,50
Student and solidarity ticket: €5

Buy your tickets via Eventbrite.

Areej Ashhab is an artist and researcher whose work addresses material heritage loss, more-than-human ecologies, and land politics. Areej’s practice spans material experimentation, writing, and film, and often unfolds collectively through walks, workshops, and shared meals. She is the co-founder of Al-Block, documenting lost narratives of the Palestinian landscape through collective walking, and Al-Wah’at, a translocal collective countering anthropocentric and colonial narratives around arid lands and futures. In her recent project A Hand of Fire and Stone, she traced abandoned lime pits in Palestine, built a lime kiln prototype in Bethlehem, and activated this lost architecture through fire, songs, and meals; following the elemental cycle of lime from stone, to paste, and back to stone.

Ola Hassanain is an artist whose work moves through architecture, film, and spatial strategies to reflect on how power becomes visible—and felt—through built environments. Her practice engages with places shaped by climate instability, postcolonial legacies, and displacement, thinking through the politics of inhabiting and how ecological and social systems shape one another across time. As she notes, “observation summons a form of power”.

Dina Mimi is an artist working in experimental film and moving image, exploring how, and when, bodies become sites of resistance. Often using found footage to explore themes including smuggling and tactics of movement, her work adopts non-linear forms of narration. She approaches editing as an open and exploratory process, experimenting with the opacity of footage—images that are in the act of vanishing.

flour must be… — learning session 2

Common Ground together with Bread Buffet hosts the second activation of Flour Must Be Cheap, their installation in flour, water, soil that becomes a learning space and a work site. In this session they will think through the systems that shape how food moves, who has access to it, and what kinds of dependencies are built into everyday nourishment.

How did food become infrastructure? What does “civilization” have to do with grain? What forms of labor, extraction, and control sustain contemporary grain distribution systems? What knowledge have we lost through industrialization and centralization? And what might resilience, interdependence, and self-sufficiency look like in the future?

From the soil that grows the wheat, to the mill that mills the flour, we will think through these concepts, not to arrive at answers, but to experience what the complexity of the question does to us. Expect reading aloud, discussion, and collective reflection, hoping to build a space for deeper conversations around food autonomy, mutual reliance, scarcity, and the social and political conditions that determine who gets to eat, and under what terms.

Bring your curiosity, experiences, doubts, and questions, and join Common Ground in slowing down to think collectively about the fragile systems that sustain us, and the possibilities for building others. There will be snacks and drinks provided.

For this event our normal entry ticket prices are applicable. For more info see Contact & Visit.

Reserve your spot via Eventbrite.

Common Ground is a collaborative artistic project by Anna Celda and Saja Amro. Using the dining table and kitchen as learning environments, their projects delve into topics such as female labour, inherited knowledge, and food/famine as a tool for control through different research objects. Their work often materialises in spaces of shared labour, such as workshops or moments spent cooking together, where the conversations and sensory experiences are at the center, sparking reflection and connection with one another.

Bread Buffet is an ongoing, experimental methodology which takes various models according to a theme. Through workshops, zines, reading groups and conversations, we collage and interweave theory, art, fiction, contemporary events and visual material. We use forms that resist academic and professionalised thought production. Friendship and curiosity become methods for passing into other worlds.

earthly suns: workshop, gathering, and performance programme

earthly suns has unfortunately been cancelled due to the weather alert (code red) for extreme heat.

A two-part programme that centers the plant-ally Saint-John’s-Wort and the queer poetics it offers. Join artists Sasa Ghanem-Chaney, Jules Davis-Dufayard, and A.E.Z Pinay for an afternoon of queer collective care. In the evening there will be a special gathering with plant offerings, a sonic mediation, and a concert by Queer Choir Amsterdam.

earthly suns is a multidisciplinary research project, developed by Jules Davis-Dufayard and Sasa Ghanem-Chaney, that departs from a shared love towards the plant Saint-John’s-Wort, and a shared love for communal singing. Together they have embarked on a long-term research around this plant-ally since summer 2025, inspired by the queer poetics it offers as it grows powerful and unnoticed between Amsterdam’s pavements. They hope to develop land and body based seasonal practices which are relevant to the current context of late-stage racial capitalism, and which can contribute to the physical, emotional and spiritual nourishment of current social change movements. This research takes form through herbalism, storytelling, trauma-informed care practices, and vocal somatics (Deep Listening). The earthly suns workshop and gathering emerge from their research and collective practices. 

Programme
Workshop: 14:00 – 18:00
Doors open for Covid testing: 19:30
Start gathering and performance programme: 20:00 – 22:00

Workshop
Jules Davis-Dufayard and Sasa Ghanem-Chaney invite you for an afternoon of queer collective care centering the plant-ally Saint-John’s-Wort (SJW). During this workshop they will share knowledge around what SJW has to offer in terms of physical and mental healing, as well as take inspiration from its resilient growth through Amsterdam’s urban landscape. They will share tools from herbalism, plant symbolism, somatics, collective singing, and vocal meditation working towards community healing and care strategies. Special guest A.E.Z. Pinay will also intervene and invite the group into his grieving practice in the form of choral mourning. In his work he explores the rhythmicality of sobs and sighs, and the melody of moans and laments, as well as the seemingly impossible task to establish a framework that properly allows sorrow to flow.

The workshop is followed by a simple dinner, between 18:00 and 19:00, prepared by maria khatchadourian (only for workshop participants). After the dinner an event will follow with a large scale collective sonic meditation, and a concert by Queer Choir Amsterdam. Separate tickets are available for the evening programme.

The workshop ticket includes the possibility to stay for the evening programme. You can note your participation when you purchase your ticket. 

Evening programme
Join us for an evening of queer joy centering the plant-ally Saint-John’s-Wort (SJW). Sasa and Jules will open the evening with an introduction to their research, offering Saint-John’s-Wort tea and oil for hand massage. The audience will be invited into a collective sonic meditation, followed by a concert by Queer Choir Amsterdam. 

This evening programme is open to all.

Ticket workshop + evening programme: €20
Student/solidarity ticket: €15

Ticket evening programme: €7,50
Student/solidarity ticket: €5

Buy your ticket via the Eventbrite page.

Sasa Ghanem-Chaney (French-Algerian, 1993) is an artist, performer, director and facilitator based in Amsterdam since 2017. They work with worldbuilding, interactive installations, collective processes, sound, performance and herbalism. Their practice questions the politics of history-making. What are the invisible frameworks at play in the decision of archiving? Which lores subsist to shape our contemporary perspectives? How can we slow down and listen to the unsung echoes of voices past? Through speculative storytelling, performance, immersive spaces and collective practices, Sasa Ghanem-Chaney questions the making of stories and our political role in the remembrance of minoritized voices.

Website Sasa Ghanem-Chaney

Jules Davis-Dufayard (France, 1991) is an artist/facilitator, and an apprentice of somatics and transformative justice, currently living in a white trans crip/disabled body. They facilitate experiences with/in nature to create internal and collective space for growth and transformation, nurturing healing ways to relate to ourselves, each other, and the webs of relations we are embedded in. At the moment, Jules is fascinated by crip and gut wisdoms, and by practices of herbalism, foraging and eating as everyday and embodied portals to remembering that “the earth isn’t an extension of our bodies, it’s the other way around” (GTDF).

Website Jules Davis-Dufayard

The Queer Choir of Amsterdam is an artistic initiative that promises the creation of a brave space to celebrate unique identities and voices. Through rehearsals and performances, they express their ideas for the futures they desire and the narratives they want to share. In the unification of their voices, they create harmonies, but also distinctively recognize the varied nature of the human voice and hone agency over their voices. Queer Choir also works a lot with soundscapes, improvisation and audience engagement. QC has performed in many venues and events, such as the Oude Kerk, Holland Festival, Buro Stedelijk, Vrankrijk, and the Antwerp Queer Arts Festival.

Website Queer Choir of Amsterdam

A.E.Z. Pinay (he/they) is a queer afropean artist, a film maker, and a performer. A part of his work and research revolves around the black ethos in France and the Afrodiasporic experience in its poetic, political and spiritual expression. Mourning, melancholy, and absurdity are elements that inhabit his creations. Another part of his practice is to cultivate his ability to exist outside of marketing values and learn from forest ecologies. This translates as activities such as resting, doing nothing, lying down in the grass, pray, mourn, cry, observe the living and to open oneself to the possibilities of different worldings. He currently studies and works in Amsterdam and prepares the publication of his first essay with Editions Face cachées.

Instagram A.E.Z. Pinay

Accessibility info

Access practices (including masking, COVID testing, etc.) are part of everyone’s participation, please read the information provided).

Covid/infection safety: We ask everyone to do a covid self-test before entering the event space. There will be self-tests and FFP2 level face-masks available for free/on donation at the entrance of W139. Make sure not to consume food or drinks for 30min before testing, and to allow 15min for your test result to show. Self-tests can be picked up on Thursday 24 and Friday 25 June during opening hours at W139, to use them at home on Friday before joining the event. Mask wearing is encouraged.

Negative results for such self-tests are unfortunately only ~75% reliable (whilst positive results are ~95% reliable), and all viruses are a risk for immunocompromised folks. Therefore, if you are experiencing any covid/cold/flu symptoms on the day of the event, we will be sorry to miss you, but ask that you stay home and join us at a later public event of the series. Please send an email julesdavisdufayard@gmail.com to cancel your booking so we can offer your spot to someone else.

Herbal safety: Consumption of Saint-John’s Wort tea or massage oils during the evening is entirely optional. Saint-John’s Wort is a powerful plant, and can weaken the effect of certain medications. Please read this one-page document before consuming Saint-John’s Wort: side effects and contraindications.

Wheelchair access: W139 is spread over two floors. The workshop, dinner, and evening events will all happen on the ground floor, which is wheelchair accessible. Our toilets are located on the first floor, which can only be reached via stairs. The nearest wheelchair accessible public toilets can be found at Krasnapolsky Hotel, 150m away, at the start of the road (Dam Square). For other questions regarding the accessibility of the building, please contact info@w139.nl.

Seating: There will be chairs, benches, or cushions available for everyone, as well as blankets. Feel free to bring your own blanket, stand, move around, and come in and out as your body needs.

Sound: The event will be held in English. There will be no sound amplification for the workshop nor the concert. Audience members will be invited to join in on the singing for some parts of the concert, this is entirely optional. 

Unfortunately, the budget for this event doesn’t allow for translation, sign language interpretation, or live image description. 

This event is part of a series of three programs, which will each have slightly different accessibility. We hope you can join us again in the future. Please send an email to julesdavisdufayard@gmail.com with ‘SJW mail list’ in the email title to be kept informed about future events.

The ticket sales will go toward covid tests, masks, and materials. If the cost is a barrier, please email julesdavisdufayard@gmail.com