Tag: Exhibition

“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

In 2021, the participants of Architectures of Noise were working individually and collectively in art-based research processes. They involve reading sessions, walks, talks, accompanied by architectural and sculptural interventions, performances, workshops, and experiments, especially in the sense of experiri (experience), reason, and resonance in the public and private domains.

During the summer session at W139, artifacts of diverse but interconnected aspects of these genealogies of experience and epistemic architectures are shared with the public. Surveying how these specialized and sometimes also ambiguous instruments (i.e., language, laws) materialities and political concepts crystallized from the past influence future progress.

Architectures of Noise is curated by Evelina Rajca and made possible in collaboration with:

Clara Palli
Pierfrancesco Gava
Arefeh Riahi and Sher Doruff
Ellington Mingus
Susanna Schoenberg
Thomas Hawranke
Lillian Rosa, Gudrun Schoppe in collaboration with Samer Makarem
Evelina Rajca in correspondence with Felipe González and Konrad Bohley
and guests­

More information:
Handout (pdf)
Information about the works (pdf)

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POLAR ROOM | WhatDoYouFightFor?

Lillian Rosa, Gudrun Schoppe in collaboration with Samer Makarem

“What empowers people to be the heartbeat of a civil society that drives the change we need in the world?”

This is the key theme of the long term interdisciplinary art work WhatDoYouFightFor? by Lillian Rosa and Gudrun Schoppe. Following up the short documentary (R)EVOLUTION and a series of events in Berlin, they used their collective (digital) Artist in Residency in Amsterdam as the starting point for developing a series of film portraits with citizens from around the world who engage in action around democracy, sustainability and civil rights.

In cooperation with Lebanese activist Samer Makarem and his network engaged in leading a civil alliance for reconstructing and building a civil state without corruption but with civil rights and democracy they are sharing artifacts of the ongoing collective research approach at W139’s Polar Room in the context of their joint (digital) residency.

Photography by Jeroen de Smalen.

Verbógen Verbrijzeld (Shattered Scattered) examines how white light can be splintered and bended – how you can become one with matter.

In the solo exhibition by Philip Vermeulen you will get to know his newly developed ‘hyper-sculptures’, which shatter and mechanically scatter white light into thousands pieces of color. The roar of colors, the pinching sound and the wind of the fast spinning machines give you an intense physical experience. Within a meta-composition the works are in constant dialogue with each other, submerging you in the dynamics between human and machine.

Philip Vermeulen is a The Hague-based artist who makes large-scale installations. His installations are  part of his ongoing research in altering psychological states through the manipulation of primary phenomena of light, sound, and movement. Vermeulen creates what he calls ‘hypersculptures’: kinetic sculptures which move at such high speeds they change our perception of the physical properties of these materials.

His work has been shown at locations from museums (Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, Stedelijk Museum Schiedam, Rijksmuseum Twenthe) to art spaces (W139, Arti et Amicitae), clubs (Berghain Berlin) media festivals (Novas Frequências Rio de Janeiro, Ars Electronica Linz, TodaysArt, CTM Berlin), and outdoors (Into the Great Wide Open, Vlieland). In 2020 Vermeulen’s installation More Moiré² has been nominated for The Volkskrant Visual Art Prize and was also one of the nominee’s for The Golden Calf (in Dutch: Gouden Kalf) in the category of Best Interactive 2020.

This exhibition is made possible in part by: Stroom Den Haag, Mondriaan Fonds, Gemeente Amsterdam, Kickstart Cultuur Fonds en PIP Den Haag.

Under Bat Hill is a group exhibition that imagines the W139 as a glorious cavern in the middle of the city. Isolated from the outside world and its dwellers, this huge space is activated through a daily program of screenings and listening sessions.

At 19:35 on the 22^nd of April, 2020, Pope Francis tweeted, [When we are in a state of sin we are like “human bats” who can move about only at night. We find it easier to live in darkness because the light reveals to us what we do not want to see. But then our eyes grow accustomed to darkness and we no longer recognize the light.] His tweet received hundreds of replies including one from @GiveBatsABreak who began, [On the contrary Holy Father, the darkness brings to the bat precisely that which it DOES want to face, not what it doesn’t. Bats are not under the cover of night committing crimes for which it should be ashamed, but providing invaluable services to our ecosystems and communities.] Through a series of further tweets, @GiveBatsABreak pushes beyond the pope’s casual anthropomorphic description, detailing how bats benefit both the environment and the economy.

Under Bat Hill presents a selection of works that too seek to move their subjects beyond casual remit. Subjects that exist in the world outside the cavern under bat hill.

Foto’s door Jeroen de Smalen.