Join us next Tuesday 14th March at 20.00, as we conclude the public programme of Dead Skin Cash with Two Square Meters*: an open-discussion between dermatologist Dr. Marco van Coevorden, multi-disciplinary artist Ezzam Rahman and initiating artists Salim Bayri and Ghita Skali about dermatology, dead skin and the body.
Salim and Ghita interviewed Dr. van Coevorden as part of their research leading up to this exhibition, and he’ll be joining us this evening for an conversation about his work as a dermatologist and the intersections with the topics and thematics of the Dead Skin Cash exhibition.
They will also be joined by multi-disciplinary artist Ezzam Rahman, who is known for his interest in the body and the use of common, easily accessible, yet unconventional media in his art practice – such as dead skin.
For more information and to purchase a ticket follow the link in our bio.
*The title of this event comes from the statistic about how much skin we have on average on our bodies.
Tag: Talk
The Alter Ego
For many years, artists have been exploring their identities by fictionalizing alternative characters. Through the alter ego, or the alternative self, one can speak about things that they aren’t often able to openly express. It becomes a way to deal with complex issues, to speak out the unspoken, and to explore the latent layers in one’s own self.
In That Those Beings Be Not Being, various artists are applying and playing with the concept of the alter ego to delve into and communicate the elusive, the obscure, the transitional and metamorphic dimensions of the self. Using the alter ego, they take the viewer into the very personal or intimate worlds of those personas that live only in the para-fictional dimensions between imagination and reality.
In this talk, artists Salim Bayri, PHILTH HAUS, and Karam Natour will be sharing their own artistic practices and engaging in dialogue about the processes and necessities of creating their fictional selves.
The program will be moderated by Margarita Osipian and Fadwa Naamna.
Pictures by Jeroen de Smalen.
Tracing Erased Memories
23, 24, 30, 31, October & 6, 7, 13, 14 November
Tracing Erased Memories is a site-specific multimedia guided walk, that aims to connect Amsterdam and Cairo through their harboured memories of resistance against state violence. Throughout the walk, participants experience the changing image of both Amsterdam and Cairo in relation to recent socio-political turning points. The walk is layered with testimonies from people who were directly involved in the 2011 Egyptian revolution and the students’ and squatters’ protests of 2015 in Amsterdam. This period forms a pivotal moment in the political climate of both cities, as waves of resistance rose against austerity measures and authoritative regimes. Through a choreographed roadmap, visitors walk through the city center in Amsterdam with headphones and a tablet. Whilst seeing Amsterdam ahead of them, the road of Cairo starts unfolding. Sounds of car honks in Cairo juxtapose with bicycles; a building in Amsterdam starts to dissolve into a burned down political party headquarters in Cairo. This experience of mixed up and intertwined realities echoes that of Moucharrafieh and Mohamed when they first moved to Amsterdam trying to make sense of this seemingly untroubled city. Through casual conversations with the guides, who bring in their own stories and perspectives, all these different layers connect towards a collective voice of resistance.
This interactive performance takes the form of a guided walk for one or two people at a time and will take place during scheduled time slots that visitors can sign up for.
Pictures by Jeroen de Smalen.
A Choir of Tongues II
Through conversations about our personal experiences and using artistic resources, we will develop and share our own tools for translation.
About this Event:
Led by Sara Santana López and Maria Paris, in Choir of Tongues II, we get together to explore what is considered a mother tongue and how we can translate it. Texts brought by everyone in each of our mother tongues will become the center of the discussion. We will imagine and discuss our own translation tools by finding ways to share them. In which language can I express myself? What does it mean to understand? What is a shared language? These and other questions will guide us while we collaboratively experiment with translation.
If you’d like to participate, you need to bring a small text in your mother tongue. It could be an extract from a book dear to you, something you wrote, a story someone told you, or maybe a song from your childhood. A text the length of a paragraph or a short poem will be enough.
Through conversations about our personal experiences and using artistic resources, we will develop and share our own tools for translation. In pairs, we will use those tools to experiment and transmit our texts to one another. We will try to listen beyond language and read other than words, translating into different ways of understanding.
In her work Sara Santana López looks for ways of participation in the political and power relations inscribed in cultural practice, finding ambivalent strategies which implicate herself simultaneously as author, mediator and part of the public. Conversation and encounter determine her process, establishing a direct space of negotiation swinging between the intimate and the collective.
Maria Paris’ practice translates silence across multiple media, revealing the elasticity and permeability of language. Often through installations, her work raises questions on how poetics can be a radical political tool. Concepts of absence and removal are entangled in various forms, reflecting on the emotional and political nature of places and language. Currently, her practice is focused on displacement and translation as material spaces for identity and poetics.
Salwa Foundation | In Other Words
A critical supplement to your Dutch language and culture courses.
Culture is leaky. As people have been moving around the world for as long as we can remember, we bring along traces and influences of other places. We borrow words from each other, and they shift and morph as they travel.
In this edition of M.A.W. we will be looking at the cross-pollination and influences between Dutch and other languages and food cultures. Through language, we can hear the traces of trade, conquest, of colonial history, of migration. Communities that have shared land for centuries – by force or by choice.
Dutch has been deeply shaped by Yiddish, Arabic, French, German, Indonesian. And it currently is also shifting through vibrant street language and musical influences. We will trace languages through borrowed words and through food culture.
Drawing from the exhibition by Sadik Kwaish Alfraji, we will be focusing on the relationship between Arabic and Dutch – tracing words such as ‘magazijn’, ‘cijfer’ and ‘suiker’. We also will be exploring the way language can both be an instrument of power – naming and fixing people – as well as the slippage that happens when language is used against the grain.
During three Monday evenings we will gather from 17.00-19.30 in the lovely space at W139 in Amsterdam. We will hear different perspectives from working in the cultural field, have a sneak peek behind the scenes of cultural institutions and gain some critical tools to learn how to make a place for yourself in the Netherlands. We will practice Dutch vocabulary and make an alternative lexicon for the cultural field together.
This event will be hosted on the following dates:
Monday 30 May 17.00-19.30 – with guest speaker Margarita Osipan
Monday 13 June 17.00-19.30 – with guest speaker Cengiz Mengüç
Monday 27 June 17.00-19.30 – with guest speaker Yusser Salih
TAKE ‘EM DOWN Scattered Monuments & Queer Forgetting
A book launch with love: a presentation, a night of conversation, performances and an abundance of presence, hosted by Simon(e) van Saarloos and W139, Amsterdam
Cocktails & books available! Admission is free. W139 is wheelchair accessible but does not have a wheelchair accessible toilet. For this event, we have arranged that our guests can use the wheelchair accessible toilet at Hotel Krasnapolsky until 22:00 hrs.
Conversations with Margarita Osipian (curator, writer) and Simon(e) van Saarloos
Music by Jörgen Gario Unom (Sites of Memory, Poetry Circle Now) and Mira Thompson (singer & activist).
Reflection by Manoj Kamps (queer conductor & theatre maker)
About the book:
Take ‘Em Down. Scattered Monuments and Queer Forgetting
Who determines what is remembered and commemorated, and why? Slavery happened long ago, too long ago for apologies by the Dutch government, according to prime minister Mark Rutte. Neuroscientists investigate how past events influence lives today and call it ‘intergenerational trauma’. How can we commemorate something that is both in the past and a daily reality?
In Take ‘Em Down, Simon(e) van Saarloos is inspired by the historically invisibilized lives of LGBT people and queers. They demonstrate the power of forgetting and wonder if and how it’s possible to live without a past. At the same time, Van Saarloos criticizes the way that a ‘white memory’ – including their own – treats some stories as self-evident while other histories are erased.
Take ‘Em Down questions the normative architectures of commemoration: if a minute of silence signals respect during a vigil, how do loud bodies perform proximity to the past? What if toppled statues become barriers for able-bodied folks, disrupting capitalist rhythms? Take ‘Em Down is not about reconciliation through guilt but about living messy lives with pain and grief.
24h Centrum – Storytelling Sessions
This event is part of 24h Centrum
The myths, folklores, narratives, and stories that shape our societies, and permeate through multiple generations, are deeply entangled with language. Led by Sahand Sahebdivani, founder of Mezrab, and accompanied by Lara Ricote and Irina Koriazova, this morning program will bring together storytellers to engage with the themes and questions put forth by Sadik Alfraji’s A Language Under My Skin. Himself a storyteller, Alfraji’s work inspires us to explore how language shapes us and how each new language means a new shape, a reconstruction, a new understanding of the world.
The program will begin with coffee and a walk together through the exhibition, followed by Sahand and a selection of storytellers from the Mezrab community sharing their stories with us. There will be room for dialogue, conversations, and the sharing of stories with one another.
Sahand Sahebdivani is the founder of the cultural center Mezrab, which first began in his living room and has since found its home on the Veemkade (after wandering through many other locations). Today, Mezrab is a developed cultural centre, a storytelling school, and hosts a wide range of storytelling, music and other spoken word performances. For this special program we’ll be bringing the Mezrab to W139.
Photography by Elodie Vreeburg.
Extractive Archives: Conversation and Book Launch
Sonic Acts Biennial invites visitors to an evening conversation and book launch at W139, celebrating the two Sonic Acts commissioned works OBIT and Hard Drives from Space — and the publication of Oil News 1989-2020, a new artist book commissioned and released by Sonic Acts Press.
During the evening, Maryam Monalisa Gharavi and Sam Lavigne will be joined by Sonic Acts curators, alongside artists Louis Braddock Clarke and Zuzanna Zgierska, researcher Miyuki Daorana, and the designer of Oil News, Farah Fayyad. This event expands on two of the works specially commissioned for the one sun after another exhibition: Hard Drives from Space by Louis Braddock Clarke and Zuzanna Zgierska, and OBIT by Maryam Monalisa Gharavi and Sam Lavigne. With their shared interests in hidden archives, extraction, and counternarratives, this evening seeks to excavate the stories behind these two works — unearthing conversations on collaborative research methods and alternative modes of collection.
Image: A decolonizing gesture performed by Olennguaq Kristensen (left) and Aleqatsiaq Peary (right) at the ‘Arnakitsoq’ meteorite crater. Photo by Louis Braddock Clarke and Zuzanna Zgierska.
Listening Session with Felix Blume
As a part of the Sonic Acts Biennial 2022 exhibition one sun after another, Félix Blume invites visitors to a listening session at W139, during which visitors will listen to Blume’s recordings and discuss his creative practice.
Blume will discuss the making process surrounding Swarm, a sound installation composed of 250 small speakers suspended in the exhibition space, followed by a listening session of his award-winning Los Gritos de México, a soundscape recording captured on the streets of Mexico City. The evening will close with a Q&A session, during which visitors will be invited to learn more about Blume’s artistic trajectory, inspirations, and recording processes in an intimate conversation with the artist.
This listening session open to everybody, however, due to the capacity of the W139, we encourage visitors to register in advance to avoid disappointment.
Image 1 taken by Pieter Kers, Image 2 & 3 by George Knegtel
Presence-Past Presence-Present Presence-Future
Join MELT (Ren Loren Britton & Isabel Paehr)for a meditative gathering for a plurality of joyful Trans* and disabled futures.
Together, we sen(s)d desires, wishes and intentions, and dream towards being in time differently. Online and at W139 participation is welcomed, we look forward to sensing everyone’s presences. If you wish to join us online, please register via the ticket link, in the ‘add on’ section, and you will receive an email with instructions of how to make your presence shown at the workshop.
Photography by Pieter Kers.
