Performance

Try-Rotting: Final Presentation

We want to welcome you to the first public try-out of 0000-00-00, bringing together all the materials developed during Para-siting.

19:00: doors open
20:00: performance

Our Para-siting space and our toilets are on the first floor, which is only accessible via a set of stairs. For more info on accessibility, see Contact & Visit.

Admission to this event is by voluntary donation, which can be paid at the door. We recommend a donation of €3 to €5.

Nina Pushkareva—Softrot and co-founder of dance collective Trevoga—is an Amsterdam-based multidisciplinary artist and graduate of the Academy for Theatre and Dance (Modern Theatre Dance). Working across movement, music, fashion, and sculpture, she approaches the body as both image and organism, caught between decay and hallucinated continuity; reconstructed from references, preserved and consumed.

Neda Ruzheva—co-founder of dance collective Trevoga—graduated from the School for New Dance Development before continuing their studies at the Sandberg Institute. Their practice blends academic rigor with subcultural grit, fusing theory, sculpture, physicality and industrial sound to probe the commodification of desire and longing buried beneath digital fatigue.

Manshee Zheng (b. 2002, Beijing) is an artist based in Amsterdam, working across installation, fashion objects and autofictional text. Her practice orbits spectacle-driven desire and the tension between sterile surfaces and psychological violence. She constructs controlled, seductive scenes of exhibitionistic hiding—simultaneously hypervisible and hollowed out.

Rot-in-Progress: Open Rehearsal

Join us for an open rehearsal of 0000-00-00: unfinished scenes, technical try-outs, still-ambiguous atmospheres, and, hopefully, mastered tracks.

You can sign up here to attend the rehearsal and participate in the feedback session that follows.

Our Para-siting space and our toilets are on the first floor, which is only accessible via a set of stairs.

Our normal ticket prices are applicable for this event. For more info on opening times, accessibility or ticket prices, see Contact & Visit.

ADE x DARKMATTER: Sapodilla

A special electronic sound programme organized by DARKMATTER Collective featuring musical performances by Amanah and Maguette Dieng that center marginalized voices, diasporic perspectives, and cultural transformation. In collaboration with Amsterdam Dance Event.

Sapodilla is DARKMATTER Collective’s signature electronic music event, presenting a listening session inside W139 with local and international artists. Since its launch in 2022, Sapodilla has reimagined club culture as a space where electronic sound, artistic experimentation and community converge, centering marginalized voices and diasporic perspectives.

Named after a fruit native to the tropical Americas, with deep roots in Indigenous histories of cultivation and knowledge, Sapodilla takes the fruit as a symbol of movement and cultural transformation. Its journeys across the Caribbean and beyond resonate with DARKMATTER’s engagement with histories shaped by indigeneity, colonialism, slavery, migration and creolization—and with the cultures and communities that have endured, transformed and flourished through them.

This event will be held in English.

Ticket: €10
Student and solidarity ticket: €7,50
Free for ADE Pro Pass holders.

Buy your tickets via Eventbrite.

Doors: 19:30 | Start programme: 20:00

Plum Road Tea Dream_The Hangout

Plum Road Tea Dream_The Hangout is a relaxed performance centered around the autobiographical video game Plum Road Tea Dream created by artist Samuel Baidoo. The work explores how we can imagine new spaces for grief, healing, commemoration and transformation. Equal parts honest conversation, collective gaming session, tea ceremony and ritual, it invites audiences into an intimate but casual space of reflection and shared experience. For this edition of _The Hangout at W139 Samuel will enter into a dialogue with The Nature of Remembering initiating artist Lawil Karama.

This event will be held in English.

Ticket: €10
Student and solidarity ticket: €7,50

Buy your tickets via Eventbrite.

Samuel Baidoo (they/them) is a creator, performer, game designer and mentor. Alongside their work in the Hanafubuki artist collective, Baidoo also works in various collaborative constellations and maintains their individual practice, which links autobiographical experiences to diverse performances through a constantly evolving archive of images, fragments of text, film stills, documentaries, musical pieces, or excerpts from series, films, games, or manga—popular culture has a special place in their heart.

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

Image: still from Plum Road Tea Dream (2026) by Samuel Baidoo.

20–23°C / 50% RH

In this performative activation of 350.000 Leaks (Griefs), Aram Lee and artist Merapi Obermayer invite participants into an intergenerational gathering of reading, storytelling, oral histories, and call-and-response.

Moving across generations, national borders, bodies, and languages, 20–23°C / 50% RH questions the hegemonic logic of the universal institutional climate established through conservation in European ethnocolonial museums. Rather than approaching preservation as permanence, the gathering begins from an understanding of care as a practice of transmission, translation, and transformation. Through personal memories, oral histories, excerpts from the work, and related texts, the group explores how memories, losses, and climates pass between and through bodies. Together, Lee, Obermayer, and the session participants seek other climates that emerge through ongoing acts of translation and cannot be reduced to fixed measurements.

This event will be held in English.

Ticket: €10
Student and solidarity ticket: €7,50

Buy your tickets via Eventbrite.

Aram Lee (she/her) is an artist, writer, and educator. Grounded in feminist materialist thinking, her practice examines how histories of power, militarization, occupation, and toxicity are embedded within landscapes, bodies, and ecological matter. Working across moving image, installation, and research-based projects, she draws on oral histories, scientific inquiry, and site-specific investigation to reveal marginalized narratives, material memory, and alternative ways of sensing place.

Merapi Obermayer (she/her) is an artist, poet, and writer born in 1947. Obermeyer calls her work “Fragments in passing,” which bring together various disciplines based on her own colonial history and the issues it raises. The city became her natural habitat—there she meets people who, just like her, have become detached from their original landscape; people who are, day after day, creating their own landscapes, which cannot be taken away by others and which can be carried forever. You can bury your roots, your childhood, but never forever. There is no need to show them to the world. They come out of their own accord. Right now, Obermayer’s attention is focused on photography, projects that are never finished, and writing.

Image: 350,000 Leaks (Griefs) (2024) by Aram Lee, documentation of the live radio broadcast at Wereldmuseum Amsterdam.

Urban Healing Fabulation: Participatory Performance

So, we have the herbs. We have the salves, the tinctures, the macerations and the fermentations. We have been asking questions about the witches put on trial just around the corner at the Dam square, finding out that we might not be too far away. But what does a modern day crip healer do? How and what do they heal? What is health anyway? Join us for a Healing Fabulation where we carefully listen to your problems and offer health to your late stage capitalism induced chronic conditions (!).

Our Para-siting space is located on the first floor which can only be reached via a set of stairs. If you are visiting any of our public programme and you have any access needs, please let us know so we may try to accommodate best within our capacity. For this event our normal ticket prices are applicable. For more info see Contact & Visit.

Reserve your spot here!

Pırıltı Onukar has been exploring the themes of belonging and community through experiential process-based and often situated multidisciplinary work, film, participatory performances, translation, farming and foraging. She is currently focusing most of her attention on the artist-run collective GROND Bajesdorp.

Ilja Schamlé is an artist and writer with an amateur herbal and social medicine practice, yet always stuck on when these things tip over from something liberatory into something lonely, esoteric and de-politicised. She is an all round janitor of a community and residency space called Massia.

Round Heads and Pointed Heads

The powerful allegory of the Nazi regime’s racial policy in Brecht’s Die Rundköpfe und die Spitzköpfe (1934) is adapted by Ehsan Fardjadniya into a large group performance that takes place in four scenes.

Performers: Noah Voelker, Fernanda Romann, Angelo Custódio, Eva Pyrnokoki, Pedro Matias, Arthur Guilleminot, Elisabeth Raymond, Anthony Nestel, Thais Di Marco, Fleur Mollo, Fazle Shairmahomed, Floris Schafer, Veniamin Kazachenko, Irini Pigaditi, Gerolamo Lucente, Toby Paul, James Hewitt, Leonie Kuipers, Kamran Novin, Olivia Malena Vidal and Maria Montesi.

Events will only be in English.

Programme

Scene 1 — 13 October 2017, 23:15
Crisis in the Land of JAHA, Rise of IBERIN and Allegation of the Lord of Boxes.

Scene 2 — 4 November 2017, 19:30
Contemporary Subversive Insurgency hosted by Quinsy Gario with the participation of Angela Bartholomew and more.

Scene 3 — 11 November 2017, 19:30
Public Trials.

Final scene — 18 November 2017, 19:30
Living Death March, Deportations and The Land of JAHA’s Future.

IMPOSSIBLE MUSIC

This event will be an evening about music that is humanly “impossible” to play and that exploits the limits of technology. The evening will focus on compositions that take in consideration the graphical aspect as much as the sound result.

It will feature real time performances of “black MIDI” pieces – a musical genre showing MIDI compositions with millions of notes and intricate visuals that test the processing powers of computers. The pieces will be rendered in real time, adding the real possibility of a system freeze or crash. Can a computer make musical content that exceeds possibilities of human beings?

We will also explore the possibilities of a Pianola, also known as a mechanical piano, by including several pieces played on an actual Pianola in W139. Pianola pieces by Tom Johnson, Conlon Nancarrow and others.

Next to that the evening will also include visualization and “audibilization” of Sorting Algorithms, which are algorithms that put elements of a list in a certain order, crucial to any computer operation. The transposition of this process into a visual and audio context creates purely mathematical proto-compositions.

Melted for Love — Locating Lost Voices

Join us for an evening that moves between research, sonic fiction, and the act of listening as resistance. The programme begins with an artist talk with Emiddio Vasquez of Lower Levant Company, and Diana Policarpo, who will introduce the research behind Bugio Radio Station, focusing on echolocation and other techniques for tracing non-human sound. Together, they discuss how listening can reveal the impact of militarisation and colonial infrastructure on surrounding ecosystems.

The night continues with Every Day Things Disappear by Urok Shirhan, a live performance unfolding as a sonic fiction from the occupied land of ‘ABC’, where words, colours, feelings – and eventually futures – are systematically erased. Told through a fragmented first-person narrator, the work slips between satire and sorrow, tracing the quiet violence of censorship. Blending spoken word with archival murmurs and encrypted song fragments, it conjures a world where remembering becomes a subversive act. Every Day Things Disappear is both lament and code, auto-myth and resistance ritual. It asks how we listen when speech dissolves and what songs take shape in silence.

This programme is part of the Biennial exhibition Melted for Love at W139, where Lower Levant Company’s and Diana Policarpo’s works are on display.

Programme
Wednesday 25 February
18:00-20:00

Para-siting: phANTASMAL HAIRSALON

phANTASMAL HAIRSALON is a multidisciplinary art exhibition and performance choreographed by Raoni Muzho Saleh in co-creation with Karin Iturralde Nurnberg. W139 will transform into a campy, draggy hair salon where members of the public—the Clients—undergo a fabulous (or fabulously wrong) performative hair transformation by wearing a sculptural hairstyle while the rest of the public watches the performance.

Book an appointment, get crowned with a sculptural hairdo by the Hairstylist—a shady yet passionate character—and then strut it outside. Wearing our avant-garde, fabulous hair-do (or hair-don’t), you turn the streets into a campy moving exhibition and a cheeky drag protest against a sterilized world. phANTASMAL HAIRSALON aims to bring back, albeit momentarily, the old days when uncanny, colorful figures would prance the streets proudly. Be aware that there is no cutting involved—but a revival of look and spirit is guaranteed.

A Hairstylist tries to realize his long live dream of becoming a Super Star who steals ALL the lights on EVERY stage. Together with Clara Saito as The Mentor, every hairdo/hairdon’t, becomes an opportunity to shine on the stage. Sign up for a hairdo or hairdon’t to help make the Hairstylist dream come true! We need you!

Raoni/Muzho Saleh is a Hazara/Dutch artist using performance, installation and the sound of mourning and moaning to twist and reshape narratives of (cultural) becoming. His work’s focus is to play with the personal, social and political edges. Imbuing his love for art, with body, spirit and politics through movement, voice and textile, he creates temporary immersions into Otherworldly feeling, relations and thought.

Karin Iturralde Nurnberg is an artist working with storytelling in multidisciplinary and sculptural installations. She is born and raised in Ecuador and lives and works in Amsterdam. In her practice she embraces improvisation and the power of spontaneous performative and sculptural interventions, to re-arrange the world around her and shift weighted positions.

Photos by Diego Diez