Tag: Exhibition

W139, along with two other venues, Zone2Source and Het HEM, is hosting the Sonic Acts Biennial exhibition one sun after another between Sept. 30 and Oct. 23, 2022. Departing from the long-running Sonic Acts research on pollution, the exhibition focuses on the inextricable links between pollution and time. Pollution is a process that usually manifests itself long after it has begun and often in indirect ways.

one sun after another touches on deep, real and geological time, embraces nonlinearity, fluctuation and porosity, and makes room for leaks. The image of the sun – as a sign of hope, glowing without burning, imbued with warmth – feeds the imagination and brings forth life.

Contemplating multiple incarnations of time, one sun after another listens to an immersive aerial choir of bees, follows a microbe embedded within lithium traveling from a Chilean mine to a digital device, and plunges into deep time through lead-encased nuclear coconuts from the Bikini Atoll. Artistic research traces the lineages of exhaust produced by oil and other extractive economies, while in other places it speculates over Greenland’s mineral deposits, now made accessible by melting ice. In the Canadian Arctic, visual narratives on monumental ice walls come and go with tidal movements, soundtracked by a cacophony of environmental field recordings. Against the din, visitors are welcome to a joyful meditation about presence, sensing and bending time, before drifting downstream, where the exhibition stretches time even further. Diving under, performative and installative artworks explore toxic cycles of water and stretch inner time with hybrid instruments and sub-aquatic amplification.

Taking place throughout October 2022, the Sonic Acts Biennial takes place across various locations, interweaving exhibition openings, performances and lectures. These are accompanied by in/outdoor sound installations, artist presentations, workshops, excursions and other activities.

Sonic Acts Biennial 2022 is generously supported by Stimuleringsfonds Creatieve Industrie, Amsterdam Fonds voor de Kunst, Mondriaan Fonds, Fonds 21, Prins Bernhard Cultuurfonds, Fonds voor Podiumkunsten, Paradiso, W139, Het HEM, Likeminds, OT301, Zone2Source, and Singelkerk. Co-supported by the European Union’s Erasmus+ program.

Photography by Elodie Vreeburg en George Knegtel.

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. Every Friday we will organize a diverse programme of performances, screenings, live radio broadcasts, karaokes, happenings or other experiments from 17:00 to 19:00.

Through an open call, artists, designers, curators, mediators, collectives, local initiatives, and communities were invited to propose projects and ideas that they consider urgent and relevant. After receiving over 400 proposals for our open call, we were reminded of the incredible lack of space in Amsterdam to present works-in-progress, to gather together informally, and to engage in artistic experimentation. 

Selected by our artistic team, the participants reflect the extent, range and variety of the artistic community in Amsterdam and The Netherlands, showcasing new works, works-in-progress, experiments, durational pieces, installations, performances, screenings, sound works, workshops, gatherings, rehearsals, informal work presentations, radio shows, and much more. 

During W139 hosts… we open our doors to give space in the city center for the artistic community and to serve as a platform to meet and exchange ideas. This initiative aims to support, enhance, and contribute to the artistic ecosystem. W139 hosts… responds to the current political climate in the Netherlands within the cultural sector, where the lack of local and national cultural funding and support has created an ecosystem of scarcity and competition. With this initiative, and in the face of cultural funding cuts, we want to embrace abundance, openness, sharing, and trust. 

Photography by Elodie Vreeburg.

Generously supported by Gieskes Strijbis Fonds, Gemeente Amsterdam, Mondriaan Fonds, and Oedipus Brewing.

Voluntarily or involuntarily we humans shed our dead skin. In this exhibition, Ghita Skali and Salim Bayri take this fact as their starting point to zoom in on the ambiguities within our relationship to dead skin—the tensions between its acceptance and rejection (some keep it, some scrub it away), its proximity and our neglect, our indifference and its unstoppable production, our obsession and care but disgust once it leaves the body.

Offering €20 per gram, dead skin collection networks emerged through gossip, online advertisements, business cards, and stickers distributed around the city repeating the slogan “get money for your dead skin”. A naive attempt to create a new kind of currency while simultaneously diverting and redistributing public money to people who took the bait out of curiosity, necessity, or entertainment. Within this context, an intimate and immediate material such as skin becomes a possible commodity. How dirty can money be?  

What happens when a value is set on something we expel from our bodies? When there is the possibility of getting a reward for something that is usually discarded, dilemmas arise between economic interests, integrity, ethics, labour, and exploitation—echoing the metaphor of “selling your own skin”. Despite this enticing offer, some people had no interest in this exchange, provoking the question “who can afford not to sell their own skin?”. 

The exhibition is composed of all new works. A Dead Skin Cash information welcome desk gives way to large printed textiles that appear as aerial views of landscapes but which in fact are made of dead skin samples from contributors. Inside empty construction and spa buckets are recorded voices and sounds from the conversations of disgust and amusement with strangers, confusion from nail salons, and a dermatologist’s opinions. Upstairs, a ‘classical’ exhibition room displays collages made with found images and collected material. Further in, the video Semiotics of the Hammam—a direct response to Martha Rosler’s Semiotics of the Kitchen— shows a character trapped in a dry hammam presenting, with irritation, hygiene tools that gradually start to feel like weapons.

Handout (pdf)

Photography by Pieter Kers.

Visual identity by Oriol Cabarrocas.

Supported by Gemeente Amsterdam, Mondriaan Fonds and Prins Bernhard Cultuurfonds.

“I am both a stranger and a native to the same land, to the same mother tongue. This century told us too many times to stay alone, to cut all ties, never to look back, to go and conquer the moon: and this is what I did. This is what I do.” – Etel Adnan

We are born into worlds, environments, and circumstances that are outside of our control—we are born into language. The language(s) we speak impact how we think about, and interact with, our environments. They influence our thought processes, our feelings, how we think about time and space. Questions surrounding language not only touch on linguistics, but they have engaged philosophers, lawyers, religious scholars, cognitive scientists, anthropologists, psychologists, and many others.

So how are we shaped by language? Are languages merely tools for expressing our thoughts, or do they actually shape them? In this solo exhibition, Sadik Kwaish Alfraji explores the complexities inherent in these questions. Encompassed in the animations, large scale drawings, and murals that make up this exhibition, are the questions of what makes a language. Is it the words themselves? Or the images of the words? Is it the alphabet or the sounds of the words or even the physical gestures of expression? Everything together is what shapes and forms a ‘language’. As a storyteller, Alfraji is trying to bring forth one of the faces of language.

A Language Under My Skin features all new work from Alfraji, including an animated film, graffiti murals, and large-scale drawings that transform the exhibition space. Sadik’s drawings and animations echo the notions of the body as a language, a manuscript, a carrier of languages, shapes, meaning. The works in the show give form to, and entangle, the multiplicity of parts that shape language—from the alphabet books we use as children to link sounds with symbols to the complex metaphors and idioms that often resist translation.

The exhibition will also encompass a public program of workshops, film screenings, and talks that will expand on, and provide new points of contact with, the exhibition and its conceptual, narrative, and philosophical underpinnings.

Photography by Pieter Kers.

Curatorial text (pdf)

Our contemporary moment is saturated with the politics of polarisation and dichotomist thinking—with us- or -against us-, liberal or conservative, right or wrong, all-or-nothing. ​Binary thinking often happens when complex ideas and issues are overly simplified into twofold answers. When instead of embracing multiplicity, we are bound into thinking about, and within, fixed categories that don’t evolve over time or adapt themselves to our constantly changing liquid environments.

This tendency of binary thinking has been affecting societies and structures worldwide, across social, political, economic, and ecological lines. The repercussions of dichotomy have become more critical with the accelerated globalised mobility in recent decades, all while the social fabric is being rendered more mixed and heterogeneous. But how are our environments really affected by the politics and tendencies of polarization? What are the strategies necessary for humans and ecosystems to coexist in the shared spaces that we inhabit?

This exhibition and public program brings into dialogue local and international artists who challenge us to move beyond the trappings of binary thinking, into intervening, overlapping, and intersecting spaces—the inbetween, the not-yet-here, the becoming. Working with video, print, sculpture, performance, and interactive environments, their works engage questions around polyvocality and the socio-political complexities of their environment through humour, storytelling, discourse, and the creation of alter egos and fictional spaces.

The title ‘That Those Beings Be Not Being’ is taken from a chapter in Édouard Glissant’s Poetics of Relation, in which he argues that “we must clamor for the right to opacity for everyone”. For Glissant, ‘opacity’ is an unknowability—an alterity that is unquantifiable, a diversity that exceeds categories of identifiable difference and resists hypervisibility and the drive for total vision.

Photography by Pieter Kers.

Curatorial text (pdf)
About the works (pdf)

He says: I am from there, I am from here,
but I am neither there nor here.
I have two names which meet and part…
I have two languages, but I have long forgotten
which is the language of my dreams.

Mahmoud Darwish