Tag: Event

With our second edition of W139 hosts… we are excited to open up the W139 exhibition space for a dynamic seven-week long programme providing 55 makers and initiatives with the opportunity to present new projects or works-in-progress. During W139 hosts… a new constellation of makers and collectives moves into the exhibition space every week—creating a fluid and constantly changing environment.

Photography by Elodie Vreeburg.

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Andrea López Bernal, Sophia Simensky and Leslie Lawrence
NOVELTELENOVELA

NOVELTELENOVELA is the spontaneous generation of a television soap opera at W139. Using a system designed by Leslie Lawrence, Sophia Simensky and Andrea Lopez Bernal, dramatic scenes of a soap opera are filmed so rapidly in this durational performance that the actors must receive their dialogue through a small earpiece, before immediately repeating them, as they do not have time to learn lines or repeat a take. Scripts for the performance are written by a large language model in AI based on ideas from a cavalcade of invited artists as well as you, the exhibition audience, raising questions of what it means to be possessed by ideological forces and non-human entities at the onset of the age of information pollution.

Artist Bio: 
Leslie Lawrence’s practice is the constant recreation of his own television show accompanied by a permeable and fantastical meta narrative about the performance of its own production.

Sophia Simensky is an artist and set designer whose material research and narrative installations reflect contemporary environmental anxieties through the uncertain histories of colonial extractive processes.

Andrea Lopez Bernal is a performance artist and current Sandberg research fellow in the field of performance and artificial intelligence.

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Birna Björnsdóttir, Milena Anna Bouma, Janina Fritz, Ayesha Ghaoul, Elena Giolo, Juan Sebastian Guerrero, Laura Canha Malpique, Peer Vink
Fountains Without Water

When energy forces to break the bonds that hold water molecules together, water evaporates. Water has dried up to leave room for imagination and playfulness, and what is left over are traces of water from the dried-out river in summer, bits of a cold iceberg in Antarctica, or the salty tears on our cheeks. Our fountains that once held water, have now relinquished it, allowing other substances to meander through their channels: wine, metal, salt, or even popcorn.

“Fountains without water” is a group presentation where multiple artists explore the idea of a waterless fountain. The show will consist of a series of sculptures and paintings that explore this theme. By disrupting the symbol of the fountain, we make space for something else, and by doing so explore different narratives. In this group presentation, we use the symbolism of fountains as a way to celebrate change, collaboration, and untried systems. The show is an invitation to imagine new stories together, by presenting different fountains, with everything but water, scattered in space.

Artist Bio:
This group project includes fountains without water by: Birna Björnsdóttir, Milena Anna Bouma, Janina Fritz, Ayesha Ghaoul, Elena Giolo, Juan Sebastian Guerrero, Laura Canha Malpique, Peer Vink.

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Los Angles Collective
139-Angles

For W139 hosts, Los Angles Collective curates an extended gathering to showcase trans talent while providing a space for members of the public (trans or not) to appreciate the importance of trans-held spaces in the art scene. The gathering will consist of an ongoing exhibition featuring works by trans artists from diverse disciplines, in addition to a panel talk, performances and intimate readings.

Collective Bio:
Los Angles Collective is an Amsterdam-based, trans-led collective aimed at showcasing and nurturing trans talent. With a strong T4T-ethos, Los Angles Collective aims to not only showcase what our community has to offer, but also create space for the community to blossom, and for our talents to be nurtured.

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Laura Grimm
Gift Receiver

Look around you, at the ceiling. Do you see those wooden beams, what trees were they made of and in which forests did they grow? Now look closer at what you are wearing. What fibres are in your garments and how many hands around the world have handled them? Which processes have the elements around you gone through before they ended up here, in this space with you?

This question is hard to answer. The origins, raw materials and processing methods of things in our daily lives are often invisible to us. In order to get closer to the physical origin of my own sculptures, I made Gift Receiver out of unprocessed sheep’s wool sourced from a shepherd in Rotterdam. After participating in the shearing, I cleaned, carded, and dyed the wool before moulding it into the large and colourful sculpture you see before you.

Gift Receiver is made out of sheep’s wool from Rotterdam, natural dyes (blue woad, orange madder, yellow weld), willow branches and boulders.

Artist Bio: 
Laura Grimm is a visual artist whose sculptural practice is infused with elements from her background in fashion and textiles. She utilises techniques such as pattern construction and material production to create sculptures out of natural materials. Though these techniques are normally applied to mass-produced shapes which fit onto the human body, Grimm uses them to create unique sculptural forms which do not adhere to these rules at all.

Grimm lives and works in Rotterdam. Alongside three other artists she set up her own studio in Hillegersberg and now uses the large former garage in this building as her workspace.

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Have A Good Dog Press and Friends
People I Care About

People I Care About is the first of a series of events that gathers friends of Have A Good Dog Press in a collaboration exploring the possibilities of sharing and collective learning through publishing. During a week-long program, Have A Good Dog Press will take over the space of W139 and accommodate talks, live-radio and workshops. 

In collaboration with: Ran-Re Reimann (builder, designer), Ilya Stasevich (writer, artist, curator), Gersande Schellinx (bookbinder, writer, designer), Aske Hvitved (artist, radio pickle enthusiast).

Artist Bio:
Dasha Leo (they/them) graduated from the Fine Arts department at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in 2022. Since the beginning of 2021 they have been running a small publishing company called Have A Good Dog Press with a focus on collaborative process in making. Their cross-disciplinary practice evolves around their interest in finding different ways of working together and providing a platform for others. 

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Espacio Estamos Bien
Kantoor Of Soft Aspiration

KOSA is a mobile desk that serves as a space for conversations, speculation, and companionship. Our aim is to create an environment that encourages artists, creators, and anyone interested in cooperation to come together and explore unconventional approaches to utilizing available resources. Using Espacio Estamos Bien (EEB) and W139 networks, we will promote the opening of KOSA`s office hours and schedule. Whether by appointment or walk-ins, the Kantoor will be available to all, with the faith of unexpected participants to come in. We invite participants to engage in conversations with us about their works, through casual dialogue, anecdotes, and even gossip. Through this, we can uncover the intimate details of each artist’s production. These conversations will be collected, along with artwork details, CVs, and documentation, to form the KOSA archive. The archive will be a space where different languages, formless artworks, unrelated themes, unknown artists, repeated and unseen themes coexist. In essence, this archive collects processes, opinions rather than knowledge, errors rather than truths, and differences of thought rather than agreements. It is a formality constructed from artists’ CVs and portfolios, an excuse to gather seemingly irrelevant information that can be woven into new narratives through its constant reconfiguration.

Artist Bio:
Espacio Estamos Bien is an art cooperative* and nomadic project space based in Amsterdam, that facilitates gatherings, publications, exhibitions, and other formats. EEB started by plotting around the idea of a new space in Amsterdam –not necessarily a physical one– that could provide an affective and supporting context. A space for those who do not belong in an institutional circuit. A space that is always changing, always moving, but always available. 

EEB is an initiator of conversations and facilitator of situations.

*Autonomous association of persons united voluntarily to form a democratic organization whose administration and management must be carried out in a manner agreed by the members.

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Public Programme:

Espacio Estamos Bien (17:00-19:00)
Kantoor Of Soft Aspiration
Vrijmibo

To celebrate the culmination of this process, we will organize a “Vrijmibo” during the public Friday event of W139 hosts, open to everyone who is curious and wants to hang out in a relaxed and spontaneous atmosphere. Attendees can learn about what happened during the open days of the Kantoor, enjoy karaoke sessions, and indulge in cocktails. We believe it is important to provide a space for enjoyment and celebration within our expanded practice, allowing people to perform differently and let themselves go.

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Saturday 14 Oct:

Oscar van Leest & Danielle Huyghe
Studies in (dis)Orientation
1.5-2 hrs performance (15:00-16:30)

Oscar van Leest (1994, NL) is an artist based in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. His practice is broadly oriented around the medium of sound, and is informed by the fields of sound design and experimental music, interaction and instrument design and spatial practices.

A series of sonic exercises with the aim to sonify the relation between the body and the physical space it resides in. Gyroscopic and spatial measurements taken from a device worn by a performer are processed and instrumentalized to sculpt sounds that are then propagated into the same space of performance.

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Fariborz Karimi
Its just too much
Performance / Installation (13:00-16:00)

‘It’s just too much’ is the title of an installation and performance as a contentious of Karimi’s research in Amsterdam as part of my research on ‘Self-Censorship.’ This sharing will take place over five days in the space of W139, including a short performance for two days and a continuous installation of texts, sketches, and videos.

Artist Bio:
Fariborz Karimi, born in Tehran, Iran (1990), received his bachelor’s degree in Theater Directing at the University of Tehran (2009-2013). He founded Bohemi Theater Collective with his fellows in 2011 and since then they have produced numerous performances, residencies, and workshops as a collective. Since 2015, his works have been shown in Tehran’s public scene and at many international festivals including ITFoK Festival Kerala, BOZAR institute Brussels (Welcome to Tehran), ACT Festival Bilbao, and ITS Festival Amsterdam. Besides his performance career, Fariborz is the co-founder at Reconnect Festival (2020) as well as the founder and artistic director of Theatricultural Exchange Residency (2017-2019). Currently he is a Master’s candidate at DAS Theater School, Amsterdam University of Arts (2021-2023)..

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Friday 13 – Sunday 15 Oct

Suntipede
The Birth of SUNTIPEDE

A three day manifestation as the debut of SUNTIPEDE. Each day, there are several spots open in which Queer and/or BIPOC can reserve a spot leading up to the debut, whether one applies individually or collectively. Depending on the ritual, the spots are reserved at a baseline of €75,-, although they do offer solidarity spots.

Artist Bio:
SUNTIPEDE does not operate as a conventional tattoo studio, but rather uses methods that are more true to pre-colonial tattoo traditions such as applying spiritual protocols. Each entangling our own practice, themes of nostalgia, food, mythology and folklore will be present within the markings. The people who approach our platform are asked to be intentional in receiving their marks. Through a conversation, the particular makeup of the tattoo will be decided on the spot, making each marking unique to the participant. For more information on what is possible, you can contact suntipede@gmail.com.

With our second edition of W139 hosts… we are excited to open up the W139 exhibition space for a dynamic seven-week long programme providing 55 makers and initiatives with the opportunity to present new projects or works-in-progress. During W139 hosts… a new constellation of makers and collectives moves into the exhibition space every week—creating a fluid and constantly changing environment.

Photography by Elodie Vreeburg.

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Aubane Berthommé Martine
The Economy of Tenderness – A Collective Mapping of Social Classes in the Cultural Field

“The economy of tenderness” is a collaborative research on the contemporary proletariat, building upon the performance “Seeking Venus”. Invited to perform by Nice Flaps (life drawing collective), I developed, in collaboration with Yassin Niemandsdochter, an interactive performance. The piece reflects on physical conditions of manual workers, self-caregiving, and gazes on Mediterranean women.

Through my interactions with fellow cultural workers, I observe economic and social vulnerability faced by many, especially non-native and non-white artists and curators. We often compromise our health, artistic practice, or economic stability to sustain ourselves to contribute to the cultural scene. This position erases us from established institutions. While many of us are working-class, I notice a lack of [self]-representation of proletarians, and an absence of analysis of power dynamics in terms of classes within cultural spaces.

Nourished by intersectional theories, my research led me to define proletariat beyond an economic position: it gathers any of the categories lacking socio-economic power based on specific identity aspects such as perceived race, gender, etc. Social classes are therefore fluid and constantly re-defined; they are rarely chosen but potentially emancipatory.

I intend to map the classes within the art field, prioritising analysis of concerned individuals by conducting interviews and debates with them. By using this collaborative approach, I aim to stimulate collective thought, present a more accurate portrait of the art scene, and oppose the stigma generated by precarity and “income jobs”. Contributing to a better representation is for me a form of community care that brings tenderness into politics.

Artist Bio: 
Aubane Berthommé Martinez is a working-class artist and curator who approaches arts as socio-political and educational tools. As a multidisciplinary artist, she uses various mediums to explore and re-construct elements defining one’s identity, focusing on gender and sexuality. She gazes at the gaze, reappropriating exotified and historical western aesthetics, honoring her Mediterranean background.

Aubane developed a research-based curatorial practice reinterpreting contemporary social classes via the organizations she co-founded: Squish, a queer-feminist cultural platform; and Kollection Kitsch, an exhibition series making art financially and conceptually more accessible. Through multidisciplinary events, Squish questions identity politics with an intersectional approach, while Kollection Kitsch features working-class artists exploring rejected or mocked aesthetics and themes.

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Tara White
Knowledge Exchange Site: Beyond These Walls There’s Courage

Beyond These Walls There’s Courage is a research project first presented as a solo exhibition at Southwark Park Galleries, London, UK. The show tenderly mapped the entangled dynamics between grief, intergenerational relationships, gender and protest. Operating in the overlaps between these frames of experience, Tara White uses the Anjili Ironwood Tree as a botanical motif to anchor their explorations of grief on both micro and macro scales. Developing on this work, Tara will collate interdisciplinary discussions and visual responses to produce a publication focusing on the Anjili Ironwood tree, which is notoriously difficult to fell, as a symbol of resistance, protest and wisdom in its native West Asian region.

At W139, Tara will hold workshops exploring new modes of communicating protest. Taking inspiration from the Anjili Ironwood specimens in Amsterdam and archival material at Atria and IISH, join Tara to occupy the gallery in a residency-style intervention, where visitors are invited to create their own protest ephemera to commemorate overlooked elders who laid the foundation for our rebellion. We’ll collectively produce a series of imagined protest posters and pin-badges, cascading the wall of the gallery as an ode to those who strived to better the society we inhabit.

Artist Bio:
Tara’s practice interrogates the layers of personal insight, imperial dissolution and grief that exist within the body. Taking form as sculpture, image or set design, they gesture towards multiple possible interpretations simultaneously. Often describing their work as collage, Tara’s practice operates amongst a collection of found, fabricated and personal objects. These talismans of memory, invested with profound significance are suspended in ambiguity. Tara investigates the cultural connotations attached to objects, disrupting canons to invoke alternative meanings.

Image 2 & 3

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Beyond Blackness
Beyond the frame: Exploring Visual Languages and the Inarticulable in the Black Imagination

This project reconvenes graduated artists from the Blacker Blackness temporary masters program. As a constellation of diasporic artists we will initiate a process that unpacks notions of collectivity in art making and sharing. We wish to shift from the standard conventions of art production and exhibiting that simply divides space and best creates a dynamic of spectatorship and move toward a questioning of what making, building and sharing art together as Black artists looks like. We will prioritize an ethic of care and connection that also holds space for the complexity of our experiences as well as our individual artistic desires and  longings.

From this jumping (entry?) point we wish to explore/reveal our working/in progress attempts at articulating a black visual language. We wish to articulate the inarticulable of the Black imagination and what that means for each artist. We wish to show our work as opposed to showing a piece of work. 

We will organize a public program that aims to challenge traditional notions of art as object and delve into the realms of space, community, process, collectivity, spirituality, and healing as praxis.

Artist Bio: 
We are a collective of 12 artists from across the African diaspora. We are quite young and already middle aged. We are mothers and uncles, siblings and daughters. We are queer, married, single, non-binary and CIS. We are new to the art world, or we were kicked out of it, or we left it behind. We are enthusiastically just starting out and we are already jaded. We are freshly traumatized. We are much more than 100 words. We are infinite and inarticulable. Like blackness itself, we are beyond.

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Theetat Thunkijjanukij
Copy Shop

Copy Shop is a small remote studio service that provides manual disassembly, scanning, printing, and copying of the printed matter. The copies appear within larger images, their new compositions distorting familiar, painted narratives. Previously hidden images are now revealed by furniture reconfigured, edited, and augmented. A library of books and records swells out within painted and stacked rectangular wooden boxes: a growing construction of makeshift order. Two easy chairs skirt the room. The single beds rotated to adjacent corners. A single writing desk sits by the windows. The collages were densely worked, each consisting of hundreds of sections cut from newsprint, glossy magazines, and color supplements. Angular shapes were pasted together, forming abstracted and numerously faceted sections framed within larger, further faceted compositions. Evident from the upper layer were the many layers underneath, their edges pressed upwards and highlighted by the varnish. Thicker book papers were used in more sparing quantities, their predominantly black and white images adding larger discordant elements within the main narrative of the collages.

Artist Bio: 
Theetat Thunkijjanukij; an artist, is working on scaling, and reproduction of niche pieces. In Theetat’s work, he emphasizes the methodologies of reproduction as a foundational aspect of graphic design. His works contain inaccuracies originating from the reproduction procedure. While aware of the subversive potential of the disparities with the source as originated by the bootlegging process, Theetat’s subversion of the context he occupies not only brings up questions of the value of the design object but also the production of meaning through the erasure of the original.

Image 5 & 6

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Sarah Emilia Maria Daniela Sølvsten
I Came Walking in Backwards

In the absence of or distance from one’s heritage, illusions and fantasies are created about what is not represented in physical form. There is a need to fill in the gaps, replace the missing pieces and make connections between the fragments. This is where my first narratives about my father’s hometown Maniitsoq in Greenland, were created – in the imagination of a child lacking a wholesome story of a place. I grew up with the Danish colonial name for Maniitsoq, Sukkertoppen (Sugar Peaks), which created an early image of my father coming from a place where mountains were made of sugar. These illusions became a way of grasping the unfamiliar, creating an even greater distance to my family history, the Greenlandic people, and their culture. There are different stages of dealing with this distance, the first being the illusion of the ‘authentic’ shaped and influenced by the outsider’s observations and narrations of the ‘foreign’. “I came in walking backwards” aims to visualise and concretise these early-stage imaginaries and is a series of works dealing with the position of the intersecting or the “third culture kid”. The goal is to make the private public through a common ground defined by the personal imaginary.

Artist Bio: 
I work in the intersection of performance, live installation, and sculpture. Utilising influences and experiences from the performing arts, I explore movement and behaviour related to the history and memory of our ancestors and their impact on us.

My works depict the overlaps of tradition, mythology, and lifestyle, addressing how they are intertwined with the mediation and production of identity through new technologies and circulations of forms. Thus, my practice acts as a space for reflection on processes of transition, hybridisation and transformation, pushing these questions into material investigations of the ‘third culture child’ and other intercultural issues.

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Public Programme:

Arthur Guilleminot
Piss Soap Workshop
4 hour workshop
14:00 – 18:00

Throughout the entire Piss Soap workshop, the basics of ecodeviance will be presented and exemplified throughout the process of saponification. We will review the possibility for local and tangible regenerative design, circular ecology and how to tackle the climate crisis while providing cleaning products. The workshop will present the full process of saponification and the steps required to transform domestic waste into usable soap. We will mix the various ingredients and create a circular process informed by waste management. The participants will have the opportunity to create intimate and personal outcomes from their own (bio) wastes. At the end of the workshop, everybody will come back home with 750g of soap to cure at home. After the 3 months needed to its complete maturation, the soap will be ready to be used for washing.

Sign up by sending an email to: piss.soaps@gmail.com

Artist Bio:
Arthur Guilleminot is an ecodeviant artist and positive maverick that practices fertile and generative disobedience. Intersecting disciplines such as design, performance, fashion, and visual art, he creates provocative visuals and vulnerable semantics, casting transilient pleasureful futures for our world. He proposes radically regenerative approaches to meet our present and persistent need for change. After his art studies at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy, his work is currently researching tools for decolonizing disgust, through “Camp” aestheticism and buffoonery. These tools can be used to explore and harvest the subtleties of disgust to make us kinder in trusting our visceral impulses, disregarding imposed norms of being and keeping an active hope.

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Saturday 14 Oct:

Sarah Emilia Maria Daniela Sølvsten
I Came in Walking Backwards — Cut, copy and paste
Workshop (13:00-16:00)

In a figurative sense, we use a kind of ‘cut, copy and paste’ method to understand the unknown and to create a relationship with it. We take a sample of what we know and place it next to the unfamiliar; it becomes neither the unknown nor the known but a fusion of the two. In this way, what I have chosen to call ‘the third imaginary’ arises, inspired by Pia Arke’s (1996) term ‘the third place’. ‘The third imaginary’ exists in the meeting ground between two or more cultures, languages, countries, and traditions. For many of us, this meeting ground is indescribable or intangible, and for that reason, it often remains in our imagination. At the same time, we are the physical representation of these imaginaries, but how do they take shape or visualize? How do they become language?

As part of the W139 Hosts program, I will, On Saturday 7th of October, from 1 p.m. to 4 p.m. in the room upstairs on location, host a workshop. In this workshop, we will focus on some of ‘the third imaginary’ complexities and their inherent dualities, contrasts, and conflicts. We will each invent poetic fable beings and use Ursula K. Le Guin’s writing exercises from “The Sound of Your Writing” (1998) as a guideline, as well as read, collectively, parts from ‘Image, Social Imaginary and Social Representation’ by Angela Arruda and ‘Goodbye, Little egg, Goodbye’ by Gabriela Wiener. At the end of the workshop, we each share our writing. As I wish to keep an intimate space with time for reflection and sharing of everyone’s contribution, there is a maximum of 10 participants.

With our second edition of W139 hosts… we are excited to open up the W139 exhibition space for a dynamic seven-week long programme providing 55 makers and initiatives with the opportunity to present new projects or works-in-progress. During W139 hosts… a new constellation of makers and collectives moves into the exhibition space every week—creating a fluid and constantly changing environment.

Photography by Elodie Vreeburg.

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Sabina Scorțanu
Disembodied Voices From Beyond the Horizon

The Ionosphere is a natural electromagnetic field, existing at the intersection of Earth and Space. Because it contains particles ionized by solar radiation, it acts as a mirror shield for the Earth, protecting it from UV rays, reflecting radio communication and hosting satellites. In my work I investigate the role of the ionosphere as a storyteller, by creating a hyperlocal radio station, composed out of three radio-satellites which re-broadcast disembodied voices from Earth and Space. These stories have been collected from local radio stations, international broadcasts and from the outer space, either bouncing off the ionosphere or passing through it. With this project I am bringing together the local, global and spatial voices, in an attempt to re-create the constant fight for communication dominance between radio waves within the spectrum. I am revealing the discontinuous material reality of the Ionosphere, as a storytelling zone with a temporal dimension, that hosts, shifts, propagates, activates and distorts the voices and signals passing within it, therefore uncovering the ghostly inconsistent nature of the atmosphere as a medium of transporting information and building infrastructures that clash with each other as a result.

Artist Bio
Sabina Scorțanu is a Moldovan-Romanian graphic designer and multimedia artist from Moldova, based in the Netherlands. Her work emerges from a fascination with the transient nature of objects and phenomena, and how their fluctuations are perceived through human engineered tools, that react and communicate with volatile environments. These phenomena exist on the spectrum where humans shape the ecosphere, particularly Earth weather, and its interaction with living and non-living matter, and how inherited local knowledge, transforms into speculative and visionary modes of existence. These visions are orchestrated through storytelling acts shaped by audiovisual works, radiophonic installations and digital spaces.

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Pernilla Manjula Philip
Post-purposing Pump-station

Do-It-Yourself (DIY) medical tools can be realised through Open Source solutions. This can be somewhat misleading, as it implies both independence and a solution-centric methodology. Shifting perspective, I examine these tools not merely as solutions, but as responses to underlying issues. Why do individuals, like myself, opt for these alternatives, and what are the realities, reasons, and possibilities that drive this choice?

Hacked medial hardware is interwoven with a community of users and developers and is contingent on the production lines of proprietrary products. I this installation, the production line of medical aid is reproduced by methods of DIY, challenging the idea of medical treatment/management as fast-moving and successfully using cutting-edge (certified, proprietrary) technological solutions. Disabled people are hackers out of necessity. Self-diagnosis, online research, and adapting/hacking of medical tech is common practice for many of us.

Artist Bio:
I use my lived experience as a starting point for researching the intersection of chronic illness and the biomedical industrial complex.

I am particularly motivated by ways of hacking and tinkering as collaborative tools of activism and how this informs new structures of collective-care.

Operating out of Amsterdam, my roots span from Sweden and South Africa, contributing to my identity as an artist and designer.

Image 3 & 4

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Michiel Teeuw with Maaz Jan
Pulled Plots

How do you treat a line from a ruler on a land?

Pulling Plots shows different works relating to land ownership & division, geometric mapping and homophobia. The exhibit centers around a map by mayor Rudolf de Mepsche of Faan (Groningen), who sentenced 21 sodomites (homosexuals) to death in 1731. Which role did his land ownership play in the process? Do systems of land privatisation produce colonial violence against gendered minorities?

On show are various drawings, videos and an artist book. During the exhibit, a performance and conversation will take place as well. The exhibit also shows the first result of a collaboration with architect and artist Maaz Jan, about borders, lines, ruins and land.

This exhibit is part of Michiel Teeuw’s MONSTER ARCHIEF, an artistic research into the “Monsterproces van Faan”. In this process, which took place in 1731, Groningen (NL), 21 sodomites (homosexuals) were sentenced to death by mayor Rudolf de Mepsche. In the project, Michiel both gathers and processes archival materials, as well as producing new work about the process and its related concerns. In this, he invites different people to exchange their perspectives and knowledge – building a network of information.

Artist Bio:
Michiel Teeuw is an artist, designer and researcher. He likes to read and think. His work fosters a tactile, direct and critical engagement with the systems around him/us/you.

Maaz Jan is an architect, artist and illustrator. Through photography, drawing and architecture, Jan’s practice captures his daily life and the surroundings of Karachi (PK). 

Image 5 & 6

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Intimidation Tactics
Sperm Stains on Cotton Last Forever, Ritualistic Sperm Staining of the Ancient Indus Valley

Sperm stains on cotton last forever traces the connection between fertility and sexuality of land and people, as seen in ancient cotton farming practices of the Indus Valley around 2500 BCE. In 1929 British archeologist Sir John Marshall excavated the oldest fragment of woven cotton at the archeological site of Mohenjo-Daro in the Indus valley. During the excavation Marshall also found clay tablets with depictions of cotton cloth and sleeping ithyphallic figures showing fertility rituals related to nocturnal emissions or ‘wet dreams’. The prevailing puritanical morals of the British Crown and the imperial intentions to reframe Indian history to suit the British colonial ambition, resulted in censorship of these wild histories. The link between cotton cultivation and the belief of the Indus people in the power of sexual imagination, destabilized the colonial categorical division between man and land, between human fertility and that of the soil. This video documentary work and accompanying lecture re-traces these connections and documents the ancient history of ritualistic sperm staining of the ancient Indus Valley.

This work is part of the Birth of Cotton project , which delves into the history of cotton farming in India and the current cotton farming crisis due to industrialized farming practices that have aggressively reshaped the rural Indian landscape.

Project Duration:
15-20 minutes 

Artist Bio: 
Intimidation Tactics is a post-critical theatre collective with no regard for disciplinary boundaries. Extensive research is transformed into a constellation of works: installations, theatre, conferences, parties and publications etc. The purpose of these experiments is to conjure reasonable doubt within established ways of knowing by asking: “How the Fuck did we end up here?” I_T hopes to produce new ways of collective thinking that can hopefully rescue us from a world that is perpetually in crisis. Many projects use commonplace materials, digital technologies, speculative writing and poetry to examine the complexities of globalisation in a postcolonial time.

Image 7, 8 & 9

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Carl-Johan Paulsen / Leo Patra
Drag Pavilion for Curious Beings and Lovers

A House of Hope is an installation in which garments, purses, shoes and wigs are woven together creating a piece which relates to the safety network that a drag house can be. The work examines the fundamentals of creating a performative yet self-expressive identity. By taking the outfits and objects out of the clubs, the work expands the notions of house, family, queerness and belonging. All garments in the installation have been borrowed from the members of The House Of Hopelezz. For w139 hosts… the installation will be turned into a Drag pavillion for curious beings and lovers. Friday evening the pavilion will be turned into a drag stage with performances by Leo Patra and other queens. On saturday curious beings and lovers are invited to come and explore drag, gender performativity and self exploration through various exercises such as; Wear your desires, Giving and receiving face, Blindfolded dance-off, Spinning your own fate, and others. 

A special thanks to Club Church, The House Of Hopelezz and to my sisters and mothers; Jennifer Hopelezz, Taka Taka, Lady Bag, Aryelle Freeman Hopelezz, Sasa Hara, Indie Nile, Banana Mouskouri, Dynno Dada, Bustie La Tish, Hellena Mirrix, Angelina Loqui, Grizolda, Sletlana, LatinX Charm and Jiji Jitsu for donating the clothes.

Artist Bio: 
Carl-Johan Paulsen (b. 1998) is a student at the art academy Gerrit Rietveld Academie, and temporarily a student at SNDO. Carl-Johan works as a drag performer under the name Leo Patra at Club Church, among other venues. Their art practice revolves around themes such as queerness in mythologies, curiosity about religious and spiritual systems, finding space in a non-binary body, public sexuality and camouflage of identity. Carl-Johan has a strong curiosity for the research and making of textiles. Through karting, spinning, dyeing and knitting they question the stories that surround us, the bodies we inhabit and the society at large. 

Image 10 & 11

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Public Programme:

Big Toilet Radio (12:00-19:00)

Join us at the Big Toilet Radio event at W139, for a captivating full-day live broadcast. Immerse yourself in a diverse lineup featuring DJ sets, live performances, and talk shows that will shine a spotlight on local underground talent while fostering a sense of community. The event aims to celebrate creativity, encourage connections, and expand the horizons of community radio. This isn’t just an event; it’s a platform to explore the dynamic facets of art and culture, and to engage in meaningful conversations. Be a part of this endeavor to amplify voices, strengthen bonds, and explore the uncharted territories of community radio’s potential. Come hang out with us in W139 and listen and engage live to the broadcast.

Artist Bio:
Big Toilet is an independent freeform community radio based in Amsterdam Nieuw West. Founded by Goy Tung and Eurico Sá Fernandes. Our mission is to highlight exceptional local underground talent by giving the contributor total autonomy over their show’s content. This approach leads to a vibrant lineup that embraces a variety of forms, includes DJ sets, interviews, discussions, live acts, and even culinary presentations. We host and air episodes biweekly from our studio in Amsterdam Nieuw West, while occasionally special editions are held at diverse venues to engage a broader audience.

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Saturday 30 Sept:

Elisa Piazzi
The Universal Non-Authoritarian Declaration of Human and More-Than-Human Rights
1.30hrs performance

The Universal Non-Authoritarian Declaration of Human and More-Than-Human Rights (UN-ADH&M-T-HR) is an ongoing and collective project that seeks to address the deficiencies of the original Universal Declaration of Human Rights established in 1948. Through collaborative moments of re-inscription and co-writing, I extend an invitation to all beings to participate in updating, questioning, and reflecting on what a new declaration would require to be truly all-encompassing. Constantly undergoing translation and updates, the UN-ADH&M-T-HR will remain a work in progress, perpetually evolving to meet the ever-changing needs and values of our diverse world.

Artist Bio:
Elisa Piazzi (IT, 1996) is an artist and practice-based researcher interested in processes of meaning-making, knowledge-circulation and (mis-/re-)interpretation.

With a particular emphasis on semiotics, Elisa works with signs, structural norms and social customs to explore the notion of universality. Learning (and listening) through making, Elisa perceives her practice as a space for personal and mutual re-understanding where contrasting meanings and opinions can exist equally and harmoniously next to each other. 

Informed by a meticulous preliminary research that combines theory, workshops and public discussions, her work is materialised through self-publishing, drawing and installations.

With our second edition of W139 hosts… we are excited to open up the W139 exhibition space for a dynamic seven-week long programme providing 55 makers and initiatives with the opportunity to present new projects or works-in-progress. During W139 hosts… a new constellation of makers and collectives moves into the exhibition space every week—creating a fluid and constantly changing environment.

Photography by Elodie Vreeburg.

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Thomas Mohr
To Make up a Balance

To connect the past with the present moment. Thomas wants to meet you. He will be present in the large space of W139 to discuss his work in progress: To Make Up A Balance. In 2021, Mohr has started to process his archive of more than 600.000 pictures taken by himself since 1985. The motifs are various, touching on all kinds of subjects: from the most personal to events which are part of the collective memory, from trash to art, travelling from here to there. In 1988, Mohr has taken his first pictures at W139. Time to complete the circle.

So far 174,528 images are processed in a system of 144 units as a first step of compression. It will take quite some years to complete the task. Conditions coming with increasing age can slow down the process. And photographing hasn’t stopped. It may be just utopian.

The visitor is invited for an individual presentation as a possibility for a conversation. Questions could be: What do we remember and why? How do we relate to crises? How do we relate to change? What is one’s reality? Can we choose a point of view? What can be expected from an artist?

Artist Bio:
Moving, changing, transformation, experience. Exploring processes of perception and memory systematically in performance, painting, video, installations.From 1985 onwards a growing archive containing more than 600000 pictures regarding a wide range of events of transition from a collective meaning to very personal moments. Distributed by LIMA. Screenings at various festivals since 2009: IFFR/Rotterdam, JMAF/Tokio, Ars Electronica, Transmediale Berlin, IFF Japan, NeMaf/Seoul, IKFF/Hamburg, Jihlava IDFF, HAFF/Utrecht, Media Art Biennale Wro, Rencontres Paris/Berlin, EMAF, Atonal Berlin, Projects with music at Stedelijk Museum, Orgelpark Amsterdam, Edith Russ Haus Oldenburg, CCAM / Scène Nationale de Vandœuvre

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Nieuw Jurk & the Wee-Wee’s
Abracadabra Garments

Nieuw Jurk processes the fashion trauma of being stuck in the system through making installative and sculptural work of worn clothes and discarded textiles, with a focus on building a sustainable art practice on a social-cultural, communal, and production level. In her most recent works, she exposes the fashion industry as one of the most oppressive systems of contemporary society — for workers, consumers, designers, ecosystems, and non-human animals.

Abracadabra Garments appeared to Jurk as a vision with W139 as the scenery, located in the sucking core of the hypnosis spiral: Amsterdam’s commercial area. In this fashion-hypnosis Pop-Up, the (shopping) public can discover and immerse themselves in the latest trends that must be followed in order to become perfect and worthy. Get rid of your fashion guilt and dump your last-season apparel on the growing piles of discarded clothes, making the immensity tangible. 

Collaboration and exchange are essential for Nieuw Jurk’s way of working. For Abracadabra Garments, Nieuw Jurk brought together a temporary collective of so-called weirdos. Featuring: soft sculptor Aga bringing the fashion victims to life; hypnosis tent builder Tudor; video performance icon Zen Archer; and film wizard Tibrian. 

In honour of Ruud van der Peijl – King of Style, wardrobe inheritance

Thanks to:
Sjoerd Vocking, 3D-printed lamps & props
Julia Walter, jewellery art
Emilio Valdes, music and performance text contribution

Artist Bio:
Nieuw Jurk is a transdisciplinary artist who throws her artistic, public, and private body into battle to analyze and emphasize injustice and hypocrisy in social and cultural behaviour and structures. In her work, she employs and unravels the implicit codes and language of clothes and textiles; shaping imaginary worlds based on real-life absurdism — magnifying human behaviour fueled by destructive systems. She crashes the hidden rules of outer appearance that shape and control our lives; the dictatorship of modern society that grips us in our fragile urge to belong. Not dodging any confrontation, Jurk shows us there’s a way out.

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Margherita Soldati and Hanna Steenbergen Cockerton
BURNOUT* MANIFESTATIONS *   For the lack of a better word

Hanna and Margherita, connected on their joint experience of burnout. Both utilise their art practices as a transformative means for personal healing and expression but also as a means for sparking conversations with a broader audience.

‘BURNOUT* MANIFESTATIONS’ is their collaborative project that aims to give burnout a tangible and visible space. By recreating their studio setups in the gallery, they illustrate the ongoing, process-led nature of healing. Visitors are invited to join, chat, and engage with the artists as they work on their projects. Hanna’s ink drawings, ‘The Confessionals/Het Mag er Zijn’ and Margherita’s ‘Alchemy of Resilience, part 2’ demonstrate each artist’s individual journey. No two burnouts look the same. Their shared vision is to break the stigma that surrounds burnout, fostering solidarity, understanding, and generating awareness within the creative community. Partnering with W139 in Amsterdam, provides a platform for open conversations about the actual effects of burnout on peoples’ mental health and well-being. Our working sessions have designated times, recognizing the importance for a healthy work/life balance and generating space for downtime and rejuvenation. ‘BURNOUT* MANIFESTATIONS’ stands as an authentic representation of resilience and serves as a space for acknowledgment and awareness.

Artist Bio:
Hanna Steenbergen-Cockerton’s (UK/NL, 1989) artistic methodology involves using painting not only as a tool for self-exploration but as an act of resilience, navigating between physical, psychological, and emotional ways of production and labour in order to create strength and sustainability in individuals, communities and spaces.

Margherita Soldati (IT/NL, 1991) is a multidisciplinary artist based in Amsterdam and co-founder of Absurd Beings Collective. With a profound sense of care and curiosity for the intersection of art and well-being, Margherita’s work centers on the transformative potential of materials and their profound connection to the human senses.

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Rasha Dakkak
to walk along the wall – المشي جنب حائط

To walk along the wall is part of a lengthy process to extract my voice from the layers it gathered due to adapting to a fear-driven culture. As I come from a stateless household, uncertainty is a recurring motif, leading to self-imposed barriers against perceived authorities.

This culture had norms, including valuing education for status. The equation was simple: more education and English proficiency grant greater access. While this calculation holds some accuracy, my journey through the teachings of academic institutions has highlighted a significant limitation. Over the years, my engagement with these corpus-based structures has hindered my ability to express myself fully. It constrained my thought process by urging me to mimic the language of scholars, artists, etc., modifying depending on the context and living between languages an endless dubbed series of thoughts. 

The work’s title is an ancient proverb circulating since the Fatimid ruler of Cairo built an extensive wall around the city to protect the ruling class, suggesting to stick to walls: to safety and security while avoiding interfering with the established power structures. 

A phrase I constantly heard from my parents.  

Artist Bio:
Rasha Dakkak is a Palestinian researcher and maker with publishing and curatorial initiatives alongside working in art and design education. Her research and artistic practice center on the interplay of language, imagery, and education as nuanced soft power tools, disclosing the subtle yet potent dynamics that underlie the creation of canons and narratives and influence the formation of knowledge and its accessibility.

She was formerly trained in visual communication and holds graduate degrees in fine art and design from Sandberg Instituut in Amsterdam and The FHNW Academy of Art and Design in Basel.

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Public Programme:

Ksenia Perek
White Cube / Manifesto, 2023
15 min Performance

White Cube / Manifesto, 2023 originates from Perek’s critical understanding of the ‘White Cube’ paradigm, comprising its thematics, modes of expression, audience engagement, and the formation of artist’s profiles. The performance presents the audience to a narrative journey to an Art heaven, where the artist explores intriguing questions surrounding trends, aesthetics, gallery life, competition and artistic ingenuity. Additionally, the 15-minutes performance elaborates in sculptural costume and free use of an electric guitar. “Imagine. Out of blue. Far in the ceiling; The Art heaven opens. Blue, pink and rainbow clouds… the techno music plays louder and louder (…) The beam-light transpasses a thin layer of press releases suspended above my head. I see a beautiful sculpture… a unicorn… on top of it – a mermaid, then a chihuahua and on top of that… a small non-binary snail with a permanent housing contract stuck in his shell. (…) I say: “HELLLO?” They say: “WHAT’s your question”? ….” – opening text, White Cube / Manifesto, 2023

Artist Bio:
(b.1993, Poland) is an Amsterdam-based performance artist.

Having graduated from the Fine Arts department (2018, Gerrit Rietveld Academie, Amsterdam, NL), she treats her art performances as an artwork, equal to a painting or a sculpture. She actualises forms such as an interview, letter and a manifesto. Perek elaborates in installation, sculptural costume and free use of an electric guitar. 

In her work she searches for a spectrum of possible positions of fine art and performance art towards collective (political and artistic) memory.

Since 2019 Perek has been represented by ADA gallery in Rome. 

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With our second edition of W139 hosts… we are excited to open up the W139 exhibition space for a dynamic seven-week long programme providing 55 makers and initiatives with the opportunity to present new projects or works-in-progress. During W139 hosts… a new constellation of makers and collectives moves into the exhibition space every week—creating a fluid and constantly changing environment.

Photography by Elodie Vreeburg.

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Maarten Schuurman
All the Galaxies

All the Galaxies explores the act of reenacting. In order to perform Bruce Nauman’s 1967 Square Dance (Dance or Exercise on the Perimeter of a Square) Schuurman translated Nauman’s movements to machine code and built an arcade machine to conduct his movements. Not only the initial set of rules but also the execution by Nauman was adapted resulting in an almost indecipherable logic. While in use the machine orchestrates and monitors the operator, step-by-step, move-by-move. During W139 hosts the arcade machine will be open for public to play/reenact. High Scores will be rewarded!!!

Artists bio: 
Maarten Schuurman (b. 1979, NL) works and lives in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. His practice employs a variety of media including video, print, sculpture, installation, and programming; referencing aspects of (online) gaming culture and celebrating conceptual traditions. Schuurman draws inspiration from contemporary gaming culture. Fascinated by the game not only as a ritual (Johan Huizinga) but also as a set of algorithmic and action based systems, social structures and visual languages. 

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Art to Support
(a) testimony of self-determination

The right to self-determination is considered a fundamental right. However, refugees lose autonomy upon arrival. They can no longer decide where they live, what or when they eat, or who they share a room with. (Undocumented) refugees live in shelters throughout the city, with limited privacy and agency in basic decision-making. Opening a bank account is impossible and prohibits them from moving freely within society. There is debate about migrants but hardly with deteriorating their autonomy even further. However, the collective refuses to label themselves as victims and searches for ways to enhance their autonomy through artistic practice. 

Art to Support is showing works in progress that reflect on their position as (undocumented) refugees within the Netherlands. The works in progress and documentation exhibited represent a testimony that enhances their visibility and voice, through artistic expression. Ultimately enhancing their autonomy while amplifying the necessity to question and explore the invisibility of undocumented migrants within our society. 

Collective bio:
Art to Support is a new collective consisting of undocumented refugees living in Amsterdam. During an initial 10-week program, the collective visited several art institutions and project spaces alternating with dedicated studio time for in-depth exploration of the collective’s artistic narrative. One of the collective’s points of interest is exploring the framework’s surrounding autonomy-making through the means of expression. 

Art to Support is part of Here To Support, which works with undocumented people and aims to make migrants visible, audible, and resilient. The projects are set up by artists, cultural producers, academics, and campaigners in collaboration with undocumented people.

Members of the collective:
Mbatudde Asha, Sidibe Amara, Charles Wakabi, Namata Farida, Ley Ley Diang Mut, Morsy Hmida, Mohamed Mussa Omar, Usman Mendes, and Veronica Lubi

Artist Sharan Bala provides a facilitating role and supports the artistic practice of the collective.

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Bring Your Own Book
bring your own FILE; on A4 publishing

For the duration of the week BYOB is setting up a publishing station at W139. We publish everyone. You are invited to fill out-in-up the given template, which will be printed on demand and distributed in W139 over the span of the week. The publishing station also serves as a display system for the ongoing research on practices around self-publishing. All the printed work left behind will be bound into a publication on the 16th of September.

Find the template here:

byobfair.xyz

Please send the filled in file to byobfair@gmail.com,come print it at W139 with your own USB stick or bring an a4 copy to scan.

Artist Bio:
Bring Your Own Book is a collective that started as a student initiative at the Rietveld academie in 2021. Since then we have been working on an interdisciplinary programme around self-publishing, activated through events, lectures, workshops and book fairs.

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Maria Khatchadourian
Flour, water, salt; when appetite becomes home

“Flour, water, salt; when appetite becomes home” is a work-in-progress where kneading and flatbread-making take center stage as a durational/sculptural artifact; a poetic space where layers of thin crust flatbread, stacked, hold within their structure and gluten, unspoken histories of labor and care – of kinship and hardship. Flatbread, with its three simple ingredients of flour, water and salt, is simple yet so complex and fragile; and like a grain of wheat, we too carry within ourselves, a landscape built upon layers of extraction, lives-as-struggle, rituals of care, erasures, and memories. Throughout this week-long experiment at W139, bread imagery will become a gathering ground where the familiar and unfamiliar overlap; flour and water, against and through the harshness, where appetite becomes home.

Over the coming year, Khatchadourian will be looking into ways to grow this work as a durational, collaborative performance, a hybrid form where movement, food, and archival research become enmeshed.

Artist Bio:
Maria Khatchadourian’s (b.1982) artistic practice exists in a hybrid form at the intersection of food and art. She is currently looking into ways to develop a multi-faceted (sculptural/durational) installation, where food and food imaginaries become the element that weaves together fragments of her research that deals with notions of exile, inherited recipes/embodied knowledge, and the endless search for the conquest of a place; a home which exists only in our memories.

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Paulina Martínez Marín
The Topiary Social Club

The Topiary Social Club is an amateur club. With its founding members—a bunch of topiary balls—we learn from club experts and transfer what we learn to our Club, which mutates to try to generate membership among the topiary balls of the world and anyone else who wants to feel part. Other times we do not mutate, even risking members. 

At first, we were mainly concerned about the legitimacy of our Club, but suddenly it took off. At our previous board meeting, an attendee who now calls themself a member suggested taking a topiary member to London and starting a Club branch there. 

This provocative suggestion of scattering members worldwide seduced us with the idea of expanding. Although we realize that just as we decided not to keep records of our members – to avoid feelings of superiority and using membership to enter spaces- in the case of members moving around, it may lead to imperialistic desires. 

Now, we are left with the challenge of exploring it. In W139, we will discuss this with experts from the exclusive Art Club. Through members’ meetings, conversations about expansion and workshops on members’ falsification, we will occupy the space for 8 days.

Artist bio:
Paulina Martínez Marín is a visual artist and community psychologist from Chile. Her practice entails arts and social processes, exploring different ways of moving with other spaces, objects and beings. 

Inspired by the boredom that the world’s predictability gives her and the surprise that appears when this predictability fails, Paulina’s interest lies in investigating possibilities of dislocating norms within public spaces by introducing strangeness and absurdity. Through play and collaboration, she seeks to trigger complicity with others, provoking ways of relating and flirting with new ways of inhabiting. 

Currently, she is the director of The Topiary Social Club.

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Public programme:

Common Ground
5 hours participatory performance/ workshop

It takes a village to feed a wedding. With Labour of Love we want to invite you to be part of our village, to feed the opening night of Hosts. Together we want to fulfil the expectation of care that would normally fall on the women of the village, by communally rolling a biiiig big pot of warak 3enab (stuffed vine leaves). Through this process, we want to celebrate and mourn the responsibility of feeding; to talk about labour, hands, inherited knowledge and community. As the pot cooks, the smell fills the space testing our patience. Waiting for the big flip, the celebration, the moment of reward. On the menu: labour, sweat, time, dedication, love and flavours. As the food settles in your stomach, satisfaction settles in your soul, and a smell of sourness will haunt you for days to come. You want to eat this food again, but you are too lazy to make it, it takes a lot of labour.

Artist bio:
Common Ground is a collaborative artistic project started by Anna Celda and Saja Amro. Using the dining table and the kitchen as research laboratories, CG creates a caring and comforting space to delve into topics like female labour, inherited knowledge and culinary histories. Inspired by indigenous food cultures and traditions, the duo responds to the individualistic and isolating eating habits of modern life through immersing audiences in sensory experiences that spark reflection and connection, and offering foodscapes of indulgence and abundance.

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Ekat Yawa
Krakend Koken

Erst kommt das Fressen, dann kommt die Moral(?) [First comes the food, then comes morality(?)] (B. Brecht). Everybody needs to eat. And we need to organize a more just way of doing that in Amsterdam. With our experimental work Krakend Koken we are bringing food justice to people through taste and smell. A recipe for experiment: In Amsterdam Centrum there is a wild kitchen available to everyone for free. We show people what there is to forage and all the things you are able to make from this. We invite the community to join us to reclaim the food which is overlooked in the city; tasting and smelling what is around us rather than only picking pre-packaged items from supermarket shelves . Finding new and just routes in the food system, we forage, find and ‘fiend’ from the De Wallen and Waterloopleinbuurt. Together with our audience, we will dissent against the supermarket chains we seemingly cannot get away from and find a new way of being together as a community with food being our love language (or commonality if you don’t like this love language text).

Artist bio:
Ekat Yawa – the art of giving back. We are 3 artists and activists who have met through our activism and now work as an art collective. We have an atelier on the Zwanenburgwal from where we do our artistic and activist activities. This season we foraged elderflower in the city to make hundrerds liters of vlierbier, been active at people’s kitchens across the city and food giveaway markets. Previously we have run a free give-away clothing swap shop. 

Ekat Yawa is made up of: Rots (@upperkutje): poet, contrarian, body builder, reasonable guy — Adil (@notshitprint): printer, video pirate, projectionist (images/emotions) — Bente (@b_nte): sewer, craftsperson, mender

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Erica Gargaglione and Kimberley Cosmilla
The Clingy Bulletin

As publishers of the Bulletin, we care to bring light to collective processes that usually remain behind the scenes. This publication intends to disseminate observations on the terms and relations entailed when organizing cultural events collectively. The Bulletin hosts a jumble of diary entries and stories dissecting the experience of participation in the current exhibition, a collage of open questions, text excerpts, and blank spaces to be filled. Designed on the go, it is a surface facilitating interactions within a collectivity of artists, cultural organizers, audiences, and/or other bodies that happen to be all three at once.

Artist bio:
After they met in the context of a master’s program (XPUB, experimental publishing), Erica and Kimberley began experimenting with collective practices involved in the field of hosting and curating.

Through shapeshifting methods but consistent use of narration, Kimberley focuses her practice on deciphering and documenting sensitive-to-document processes. Her area of concern includes collective processes, collective editorial, dissemination techniques, and vernacular archiving methods. Erica’s work evolves around digital tools and situated small-scale infrastructures that can enable public spaces for communities, relations of care and collaborative autonomy.

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Kexin Hong
Objects In The Mirror Are Closer Than They Seem.
20 min Film

Propaganda exploits a symbolic “Other” to achieve its political objectives and in the post-truth era of social media, historic traumas are either obscured or re-appropriated through sensationalist digital representations. Digital capitalism breeds as the intensity of self-projection perpetuates cycles of sensory numbing which in fact contributes to the construction of a centralized “reality”. Our data and experiences serve authoritarian goals, concealing our traumas and confining our faculties. This process iterates in the post-truth era, catalyzing our repetition compulsion. Objects In the Mirror Are Closer Than They Appear is an art video developed from Kexin’s fictive I-novel to prompt reflection on projective identification and selfhood in the post-truth era of the virtual world. Video allows Kexin to comment on gaze relations in locating the so-called truth, it is this distance that makes “truth” easier to produce and control. The film’s protagonist is suddenly unable to perceive her own reflection in real life and begins instead to project her missing sense of self onto an online character. This virtual other gradually becomes the fictional reality through which the protagonist confirms her identity

Artist bio:
Kexin Hong (b. China) is a multidisciplinary artist and designer working with video, installation and digital fabrication to explore psychosocial and political forces in the digital realm.

Kexin investigates the increasingly blurred lines between reality and virtuality, the real and the fictive, truth and post-truth, particularly in relation to the self and how it responds to bodies of power in the digital age. Kexin investigates the ways in which propaganda exploits a symbolic “Other” to achieve its political objectives, specifically in the context of the post-truth era and 
social media.

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Yan-Zhi Kang
I tried to carry a statue with me
Film

In life, there are certain situations where people have to learn to move on from the past and live life, adapting to new perspectives. During this process, certain things cannot be preserved, while others are constantly remembered, reinforced, and eventually coalesce into beliefs.

While delving into the memories of family within this belief, I discover plausible traces derived from the history of East Asia and ideology originating from geopolitics. By seeking out fragmented pictures of past memories and reenacting them, I attempt to reassemble the ideological tension derived from fragmented beliefs in the past and present, visualizing it in the form of a textual narrative.

Artist bio:
Yan-Zhi Kang (b. 1996) is a visual artist based in The Netherlands. His artistic practice, utilizing video and installations as mediums, seeks to reacquaint us with the seemingly reasonable yet troubling trivialities of everyday life that affect most people. Through research in archival documents, interviews, and narrative reconstructions, he frequently combines first-person narration with the experiences of others to share the emotive encounters hidden beneath the mundane matters of daily life with viewers.

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Hahae Son
Paint me to Life
PERFORMANCE 2 HRS

Using her body as the literal canvas upon which those present may paint, the white layer upon her skin represents the scars the artist has accumulated over the years, as well as being the traditional mourning color of Corea. With the artist herself healing from and addressing societal evils such as loneliness, abuse, and oppression, she invites co-creators to engage in contributing to our collective liberations by asking for consent to “paint only what you need”, above all with a grounding intention of love.

Artist bio:
Hahae Son (she/they) is a multidisciplinary creator working to unravel the spaces between the known and unknowable. Aiming to nurture genuine intimacies, her work explores the meaning of love. 

8 July, SALWA is organizing a conveniently Extremely Late Brunch from 18:00 to 22:00. You can RSVP via the link in bio, and pay at the door!⁠
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The brunch will include interventions and live interviews in collaboration with INC’s The Void. The brunch will inappropriately end by a drag performance by Créme de L’Amer @cremedeamer ⁠
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The event is part of our Internet Café Gatherings and exhibition program, and will take place at W139.⁠
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Tickets are €5 (RSVP in bio, pay at the door).

Taking place on March 8 at W139, A Reality Through Words and Images is a group screening programme of experimental documentaries, essay films, and poetry by Iranian artists. The screening programme directly or indirectly introduces ideas about permeability and entropy, political environment, the female body, displacement and ruination through excursions into family history. With video work by Mehraneh Atashi, Amirali Ghasemi, Mahoor Mirshakkak, VidAmir, and Gelare Khoshgozaran, whose works embrace the radical aesthetics of documentary and contemporary art. 

Below you will find a list of featured artists’ and their work: 

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Gulistan (Rose Garden) | 06:40 | by Mehraneh Atashi, 2011

Based on a poem written by Saadi, a 13th century Persian poet: “The night was spent at the garden with a friend; such a pleasant setting with tree branches meeting above, as if pieces of crystal and the cluster of pleiades were hanging from its vines. In the morning, when the thought of returning exceeded the desire to stay, I saw my friend ready to leave for the city with a lapful of flowers, basil, and hyacinth. I said: “As you know, flowers do not last and unfulfilled are the promises of the garden. Men of wisdom advise against attachment to that which is ephemeral.” “So, what is to be done?” asked my friend. I replied: “For the pleasure of observers and the delight of those present, I shall compose the gulistan (‘The flower garden’) whose pages the autumnal wind cannot rend and whose vernal bliss the passage of time cannot turn to the woes of winter.”

Mehraneh Atashi (b. Tehran, Iran) Atashi holds a BFA in Photography from Tehran University of Art, IR and completed the two-year residency at the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam, NL. Mehraneh’s work unfolds between the time of the self and the time of the world. Through an excavation of memories, archiving and documentation of the self. Her works have been exhibited internationally.

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Sediment | 18:00 | by Vida Kashani and Amir Komelizadeh, 2019

‘Sediment’ is a short docu-fiction film. In this film, which takes place both in Iran and the Netherlands, there is a focus on girls and women in two cultures—Iranian and Dutch—which provides the viewer another way to look at diversities. There is a sense of sameness, rather than individuality, that emerges, despite their differing social and cultural environments. But at the same time, the viewer is aware of their very real social, economic and cultural divides. The film is a visualisation of gaps and struggles in the stories and the upbringing of women which causes social injustices in both cultures. 

Vida Kashani (b. Tehran, Iran) and Amir Komelizadeh (b. Tehran, Iran) have a collaborative artistic practice under the name ‘VidAmir’, that moves from Iran outward to places such as the Netherlands, where they have been living since 2011. VidAmir’s practice encompasses the practices of art, filmmaking, installation, and is united conceptually by interests in poetry, storytelling, archive, and politics which provoke new imaginaries that are equally bound to aesthetics. VidAmir centre collaboration in their practice; they have thus far completed several projects in intensive collaborations with musicians, philosophers, and citizens. Their work has been screened/exhibited internationally. 

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Beak of Lies | 06:05 | Amirali Ghasemi  and Mahoor Mirshakkak, 2020

‘Beak of Lies’ is based on a poem of the same name by Amirali Ghasemi. It has been a while that he has been collecting his empty asthma inhalers, which are used in the film to visualise the poem. Mahoor Mirshakkak recorded the audio and video of the piece as Amirali Ghasemie re-performed the part. ‘Burning Things’ is an archival installation/expanded cinema project. It was developed and executed in the quarantine period as a self-assigned residency program at New Media Projects. 

The gloomy and bizarre words emulate events surrounding us in 2020 besides the political climate that made it even worse. The calm atmosphere of the analog lab creates an immediate unbalance when the mechanical aspect of making Photograms (without paper) creates a passing moment: the words will only last a few seconds. Though it is enough for the performer to read them, the words will inevitably disappear into the void. 

Amirali Ghasemi (b. Tehran, Iran) is a curator, media artist and a graphic designer based between Tehran & Berlin. Ghasemi has shown his photographs, videos, design works in various festivals and exhibitions internationally. As a curator he has been directing many exhibitions, workshops, and talks for Parkingallery projects, such as *Deep Depression (2004-06), Sideways (2008).

Mahoor Mirshakkak (b. Tehran, Iran) is a multimedia artist, filmmaker and sound designer who lives and works in Tehran. She holds a bachelor’s degree in painting from the Faculty of Fine Arts in Tehran University.

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Royal Debris | 35:00 | by Gelare Khoshgozaran (b. Tehran, Iran), 2022

Located at 3005 Massachusetts Ave N.W. Washington D.C., the former embassy of Iran in the US has been shuttered for four decades. The vacant and abandoned building embodies a contradiction: it is a ruin due to its deteriorating condition caused, in large part, by the ongoing US sanctions on Iran, and it is privileged with an exceptional protection thanks to its ‘foreign mission’ status. Taking the building’s symbolic and material status as its departure point, Royal Debris is a rumination on borders, displacement and ruination through excursions into family history, architecture, poetry and contemporary arts.

Gelare Khoshgozaran (b. Tehran, Iran) is an artist, filmmaker and writer whose work engages with the legacies of imperial violence. She uses film and video to explore narratives of belonging outside of the geographies and temporalities that have both unsettled our sense of home, and make our places of affinity uninhabitable. Gelare has exhibited internationally and is an editor at MARCH: a journal of art and strategy.

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The programme is curated by Vida Kashani, an Iranian independent filmmaker, writer, multimedia visual artist, and producer based between Amsterdam and Groningen. She holds a master’s degree in Arts and Design, moving image direction, from the Sandberg Institute. She is often inspired by her socio-political encounters, hence is interested in telling untold stories, focusing on issues such as gender, being a woman, and inhabitants of neo-liberal cities. She tells these stories through a poetic approach which stems from her Persian background. 

Thinking in the aftermath of Jina’s (woman, life, freedom) uprising, Vida Kashani has curated an evening of screenings by Iranian artists in the hope of offering some insight into the situation in Iran through films and video art. The current Iranian protest is a reaction towards the death of Jina Mahsa Amini, a young woman of Kurdish descent who died after being arrested by morality police for improper hijab. There have been demonstrations in more than 160 cities, making it the largest wave of protests in years. This evening seeks to create solidarity with the struggles of incredibly courageous Iranian people fighting for equality, freedom and human rights. 

During the evening you can donate money, which will go to non-governmental organisations based in Iran that allocate their funds to women’s rights activists organisations such as Mehrafarin organisation and Nedaye Mandegar. 

If you would like to attend this event please reserve a (free) ticket via Eventbrite, this is so we know how many people to expect.