Sonic Acts Biennial 2024

Encompassing the curatorial underpinnings of The Spell of the Sensuous, the 2024 Biennial exhibition illuminates the fluid, porous boundaries between the human and more-than-human, embracing a multiplicity of ways of sensing and engaging with the thresholds of the body.  

Taking shape across W139 and Looiersgracht 60 in the centre of Amsterdam, the exhibition brings together tactile sculptures, video works, and large-scale installations. Seeking to echo and give form to the ongoing environmental crisis, the featured artists examine dominant exploitative paradigms, the unexposed histories of contamination, bodily landscapes, and postnatural ecosystems. At the same time, and drawing on feminist theorist and physicist Karen Barad’s text On Touching – The Inhuman That Therefore I Am, the works propose tactics of ‘visual hapticity, sensory attunement, interspecies signalling, affectively charged multisensory dance and technological intimacies’. In this sense, they aim to bridge the gap between embodied encounters and those mediated by technology, uncovering hybrid ways of relating to the world and its ecosystems.  

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People’s Forum

People’s Forum, Farida Sedoc’s first solo exhibition, explores the conditions for art as livelihood and as a vehicle for change. Sedoc starts from her own precarious experience as an artist to address new forms of collectivity. Amplifying past and current voices of diasporic and transnational communities, the exhibition reports on resistance and civil disobedience, and suggests tools for emancipation. The punk, reggae, and hip-hop aesthetics in her visual imagery contrast the visual language of mainstream media.

In People’s Forum, repurposing this visual research material echoes the spirit of the 80s and proposes alternative realities of the present. This not only forms the basis for addressing many urgent topics in the exhibition and in society today but also speaks about global power structures in relation to people’s social, cultural, and economic positions.

Next to a series of new works by Sedoc, People’s Forum will bring together a program offering alternative and accessible forms of artistic production and autonomy: an art market, how-to workshops, and an office-in-residence of Platform BK.

Office-in-residence:
Platform BK offers insights into their work as an advocacy organisation for artists and cultural workers, aiming to mobilise independent art workers, encouraging self-organisation and solidarity for a better art climate.

People’s Forum is generously supported by Amsterdam Fund for the Arts, Cultuurfonds, Mondriaan Fund, Pictoright, Gieskes-Strijbis Fund, and Oedipus Brewing.

Photography by Pieter Kers.

Dead Skin Cash

Voluntarily or involuntarily we humans shed our dead skinIn 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.

SALWA’s Internet Cafe

Are you curious about how the internet has shaped the lives and creative expressions of migrant communities? During SALWA’s Internet Cafe, we will dive into the topic of internet infrastructure in relation to migration.

For the last three months, participants of SALWA’s residency program explored the experience of using the internet in communal and physical spaces, and how this has influenced the visual language of creatives with a migrant background. SALWA and W139 are more than excited to share the results with you and present our resident artists Chen Yu Wang, Geo Barcan, Hala Alsadi, and Sixin Zeng who have been exploring questions revolving around the internet as a space, whether it’s virtual, physical, or conceptual.

The event takes place over several days, featuring a series of screenings, performances, discussions, and site-specific installations hosted at W139. The themes they will be exploring include the experience of using the internet as a community and the knowledge that has emerged from it. They will also be examining nostalgia and memories, local internet infrastructures, digital migration, online gender roles, and pop-visual and sonic languages that emerged from the late 1990s and early 2000s.

SALWA’s Internet Café is generously supported by Creative Industries Fund NL and Amsterdam Fonds voor de Kunst. Partners include The Finnish Cultural Institute for the Benelux, The Hmm, Varia Zone, W139 and The Institute of Network Cultures.

Photography by Giovanni Salice.

More information here.

Substitutes

Substitutes engages with queer history and discourses around the body, gender, and sexuality. It features artists across several generations working in a variety of mediums to contextualise and converse with these discourses. The exhibition is about the absence of bodies, the abstraction of the body, and the tools and language we use to maintain or describe our bodies—costuming, staging, masks, layering, clothing. It questions the normative frameworks that queer and functionally diverse people are subjected to. The human body is, paradoxically, both absent and present within the exhibition. 

Initiated by the artist Philipp Gufler, Substitutes brings together works of Lorenza Böttner, Johanna Gonschorek, Elisàr von Kupffer, Rabe perplexum, Louwrien Wijers, Johannes Büttner, and Bruno Zhu. Philipp Gufler will show a new work titled Body/Text: a large-scale silk screen printed textile piece that draws inspiration from Elisàr von Kupffer’s panorama painting Klarwelt der Seligen (Clear World of the Blissful). By connecting contemporary discussions to historical perspectives, the exhibition aims to create a ‘living archive’. Drawing together artistic positions from then and now, the exhibition traces queer lives and networks from the past to our present. 

Find the PDF version of the exhibition handout here.

This exhibition is generously supported by Mondriaan Fonds, Gieskes-Strijbis Fonds, Amsterdam Fonds voor de Kunst, Fonds21, Goethe Institut, Centro Elisarion, Pro Elisarion Association, Monacensia im Hildebrandhaus, Forum Queeres Archiv München and Grafisch Atelier Hilversum.

Exhibition Photography by Pieter Kers.

Visual Identity by Jacob Hoving.

Turning Towards Fluidity: Tournament of the Unknown

From 19 November until 18 December 2022, Gabriel Fontana’s Turning Towards Fluidity: A Tournament of the Unknown will take place at W139. Unfolding over a period of one month, and running parallel to the World Cup, A Tournament of the Unknown aims to overcome binary thinking and rigid social values, through a series of games, ceremonies, workshops and classes.

The Tournament of the Unknown will serve as a framework through which we think, act, and engage amongst each other, inviting us to re-imagine alternative modes of being together in society.

During the opening and the closing, the audience can actively participate in the tournament. Also, various groups – ranging from local schools to art organisations – will be invited to participate in the organised games held at W139. In addition to the tournament, an exhibition and public programme will take place in the W139 ‘arena’ so that the space is also activated in between games. We will be showing a selection of artworks and we will be organising a public program that includes lectures, a film night, and mediated world cup viewing sessions.

The exhibited artworks, which include installations, textiles, and video works, will intervene into the sports hall and provide new entry points into sports as a microcosm of society. Next to this we have curated a selection of clothing and accessories by independent designers and artists that engage with the intersection of sports and fashion. Merchandise, specially designed for the exhibition, will also be available at the W139 shop.

Participating artists are Ronnie Close, Delphine Dénéréaz, Martynas Gailiušas, Davy de Lepper, John Lucas, Claudia Rankine, Julius Thissen, Paul Whitty, Versatile Forever and Sample.CM.

Handout (pdf)

Photography by Zazie Stevens and Elodie Vreeburg.

Visual identity by Sheona Turnbull and TAL.

Supported by VriendenLoterij Fonds, Creative Industries Fund NL, Mondriaan Fonds, City of Amsterdam and Concrete.

A Language Under My Skin

“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)

That Those Beings Be Not Being

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

Architecture of Noise

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)


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

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.