The Wild: Zine Launch

The Wild is een serie pop-up boekwinkels en kunstervaringen geïnspireerd op de traditie van zwarte vluchtigheid, geïnitieerd door Tracian Meikle en Marly Pierre-Louis.

In een workshop zines maken op 14 november 2021, gefaciliteerd door Marly Pierre-Louis en Kimberley Cosmilla, met 11 man, verzamelden en maakte collages van ons materiaal uit zwarte literatuur en persoonlijke archieven, en creëerden zo routekaarten voor bevrijding. Alle zines werden in riso gedrukt.

Tijdens de launch zullen Kimberley en Marly spreken over de radicale geschiedenis van het maken van zines en het drukken van Riso printers en wat het betekent om verhalen te produceren en te verspreiden buiten de traditionele uitgeverijen om.

De zines van de workshopdeelnemers zijn samengevoegd tot een collectie die tijdens de launch te koop zal zijn.

Foto’s door Jeroen de Smalen.

Pizza’s For the People

We vertonen Hwang Kim’s Pizzas for the People (2013) en de documentaire video over de totstandkoming van de film. Naar aanleiding van de video organiseren we onze eigen speciale pizzaparty!

Noord-Korea is een van de meest cultureel geïsoleerde landen ter wereld. Om de nationale identiteit te beschermen tegen wat wordt gezien als mogelijk corrumperende invloeden van buitenaf, controleert de regering streng alle media. Toen de onlangs overleden leider Kim Jong-il echter besloot dat de beschikbaarheid van pizza voor de rijke politieke elite van nationaal belang was, leidde dat tot de opening van de allereerste Noord-Koreaanse pizzeria. Als reactie daarop liet kunstenaar Hwang Kim Chinese smokkelaars een instructie-DVD voor het maken van pizza’s Noord-Korea binnensmokkelen (aangezien DVD-spelers wijdverbreid zijn in Noord-Koreaanse huizen), waar deze zou worden beschouwd als illegale propaganda. Pizzas for the People is een kritische verkenning van hoe design op een speelse manier kan bijdragen en invloed kan hebben op een sociaal en cultureel niveau, waarbij een ideologische status quo subtiel wordt uitgedaagd.

Het avondprogramma bestaat uit een ‘make-your-own pizza party’ en vertoningen van Hwang Kim’s Pizzas for the People en de documentaire video over het maken van de film.

Real-Time History

In de loop van wereldwijde conflicten kan visueel materiaal, gegenereerd door getrainde en ongetrainde videomakers, mogelijk de enige documentatie zijn van vastgelegde gebeurtenissen. In hedendaagse tijden van post-waarheid en wijdverspreide manipulatie van mediaverhalen worden de betrokken poortwachters, verzorgers en tolken van dergelijke documentatiekluizen essentieel in het vaststellen van gerechtigheid, maar ook in het algemeen in het herdenken van belangrijke gebeurtenissen voor toekomstige generaties.

In de nasleep van het Syrische conflict zijn in 2020 een aantal Europese rechtszaken begonnen waarin aanklagers zich beriepen op het beginsel van universele rechtsmacht in het internationaal recht om personen te vervolgen die nu in Europa zijn gevestigd en die misdaden tegen de menselijkheid hebben begaan in Syrië. Deze ontwikkelingen maken het mogelijk dat videomateriaal bijdraagt aan de juridische follow-up van oorlogsmisdaden, ook al is dat niet in een Syrische context.

Real-time History is een serie videogesprekken die een kijkje neemt achter de schermen om perspectieven te verkennen van “makers”, “distributeurs” “analysers”, “archivarissen” en “juridische interpretatoren” die vragen stellen, bijdragen en waken over accurate en gedetailleerde interpretaties van open source beeldmateriaal. In het programma van vanavond gaan we de dialoog aan rond het Real-time History project – een lopend onderzoek dat artistieke methodes van subjectieve, beeldgerichte analyse gebruikt om videomateriaal in verband met het Syrische conflict naast elkaar te leggen en te interpreteren.

Het programma begint met een vertoning van de eerste iteratie van Real-time History, die in september 2018 werd gelanceerd als een 22 minuten durende video en zich richtte op videoreportages van een specifieke vermeende aanval met een chemisch wapen die op 7 april 2018 plaatsvond in de stad Douma. De meeste van de belangrijkste video’s in kwestie zijn gevonden op het webplatform Syrian Archive (www.syrianarchive.org), “een door Syriërs geleid en geïnitieerd collectief van mensenrechtenactivisten dat zich toelegt op het cureren van visuele documentatie met betrekking tot mensenrechtenschendingen en andere misdaden”. Na de vertoning zullen Foundland Collective (Lauren Alexander en Ghalia Elsrakbi) en Hanna Rullmann ons vergezellen om in dialoog te gaan over de nieuwe en zich ontvouwende iteraties van Real-time History, waarbij we kijken naar hoe archieven worden verzameld; de kracht en waarden die voortkomen uit de analyse van open source materiaal; en het belang van het openstellen, bevragen en omarmen van de complexiteit van collectieve verhalen.

Waarschuwing: Dit evenement bevat gevoelige video-inhoud die gewelddadigheden toont.

The Platform Presents Iran vs USA

Onderzoeker Nathanja van den Heuvel en Gabriel Fontana voerden op 29 november een gesprek over hun gezamenlijke onderzoek naar sport en queer pedagogies. Dit werd gevolgd door een live screening van de WK voetbalwedstrijd Iran vs USA. The Platform bemiddelde en ontregelde de vertoning via een live augmented visual overlay. Het voetbalcommentaar werd vervangen door een DJ set van twee DJ’s die tegen elkaar, en back-to-back draaiden: Moody Mehran, een Iraanse DJ en Claire Clover uit de VS. Het evenement was non-profit, en van elk kaartje ging 2 euro naar de in NL gevestigde, door vrouwen geleide Iraanse organisatie Jina Collective.

Foto’s door Elodie Vreeburg.

Refresh Amsterdam # 2

Bidnan3eesh – بدنا نعيش (WE WANT TO LIVE), 2022

Het neonkunstwerk met de Arabische tekst بدنا نعيش (Wij willen leven) is gemaakt door beeldend kunstenaar Susanne Khalil Yusef. Het ontwerp van het neon is gebaseerd op de handgeschreven tekst van Hamza, een bevriende kunstenaar van Khalil Yusef die in de Gazastrook leeft. ‘Wij willen leven’ is een hartenkreet die haar inspireerde tot het maken van dit kunstwerk. Onder de Israëlische bezetting van Palestina zijn de leefomstandigheden slecht en onveilig, vaak al een leven lang de realiteit voor veel inwoners.

Als tegenhanger van dit geweld maakt Khalil Yusef vrolijk ogende installaties, waarin zij gebruikmaakt van veel kleur en uiteenlopende materialen, van tapijt tot glas, maar ook keramiek en videowerk. Achter haar felgekleurde werken gaat echter een wereld schuil van dreiging, ontheemding en angst.

De installatie We Come in Pieces (2023) van Khalil Yusef is te bezoeken in het Amsterdam Museum. Andere versies van het neonkunstwerk zijn te zien bij ROZENSTRAAT – a rose is a rose is a rose en OBA Oosterdok.

Dit werk is onderdeel van de kunstmanifestatie Refresh Amsterdam #2, waarbij kunstenaars, geselecteerd door middel van een open oproep, werk maken rond Amsterdamse stadscultuur. Het thema van deze tweede editie is War & Conflict. Refresh Amsterdam is een initiatief van het Amsterdam Museum in samenwerking met meer dan 20 cultuurinstellingen in de stad. Kijk voor meer informatie op www.amsterdammuseum.nl

W139 hosts… 2023 – Week 7

Met de tweede editie van W139 hosts… zijn we verheugd onze tentoonstellingsruimte te openen voor een dynamisch zeven weken durend programma dat 55 makers en initiatieven de kans biedt om nieuwe projecten of werk-in-uitvoering te presenteren. Tijdens W139 hosts… betrekt elke week een nieuwe samenstelling van makers en collectieven de tentoonstellingsruimte, die omvormt tot een omgeving die voortdurend in verandering is.

Foto’s door Elodie Vreeburg.


Anahit Yakubovich
Data Harvest Selfie

Data Harvest Selfie is a durational interactive performance that physically visualises the extractive processes of surveillance capitalism from our simulated world of images, by transforming the gallery space into a model of a digital platform where visitors are confronted with their own observed image while they consume images themselves. Using the pre-internet medium of printed matter as well as the timelessly surveilled sexualised feminine body, I perform in the role of content creator, engaging in a cycle of selfie taking, each image being instantly printed upon capture, flooding the gallery space with my digital reincarnations. Dressed as a stereotypical bimbo I allude to how algorithms are influenced by the male gaze and how sexualising one’s own feminine body is a known method of generating profit, causing feminine bodies on the internet to change in accordance to the algorithms preferences. While the feminine body profits off of its adoption of male-gaze oriented algorithmic preferences, the platform that the body exists on profits simultaneously of all user activity surrounding these images by harvesting the data and mining it for valuable predictive information that will be sold to those interested in manipulating human behaviour. 

Artist Bio:
Anahit Yakubovich is a Russian-American 22 year old currently studying at Gerrit Rietveld Academie. She loves to read theory, wear cute outfits and take sexy pictures for instagram. Previously she has been a sex worker, where many of her clients were powerful tech bros, they inspired Anahit to start researching tech ethics because she found herself profoundly disagreeing with many of their views which prioritised profit over human connection. Currently, in her art practice Anahit is interested in overthinking images, creating research based immersive installations and using her work to confront her past and future. 

Image 1


Ulrike Möntmann
Parrhesia: The Risky Activity of Speaking Up and Speaking Out

OUTCAST REGISTRATION serves as an archive of all research projects by Ulrike Möntmann and documents their results. The data collected during all phases of the projects enable observations and comparisons to be made of the cultural, social, geographical, and political differences as well as the numerous parallels in the lives of the project participants. 

Central to OUTCAST REGISTRATION and the projects are the biographies of drug-addicted women in Europe. In dialogue with the participants, the facts of their biographies are ascertained and put into a specific form with the aid of the Matrix Method, which presents their lives as a sequence of events and decisions, actions and reactions.

The conceptual architecture of the OUTCAST REGISTRATION is based on the study of different social spaces: the isolated space, the cultural space, and the public space. The situation and perspectives of drug-addicted women are made perceptible in terms of their social context in each of these spaces.

Both THIS BABY DOLL WILL BE A JUNKIE and PARRHESIA are gender-specific arts-based research projects focusing on an issue that western European countries have consistently ignored. Although women drug addicts represent “only” 4 to 14% of Europe’s total population of drug users and are thus considered by the legal system and society as a “negligible phenomenon”, around 65% of the inmates in women’s prisons are drug addicts. How can it be that this state of affairs leads to the marginalisation of this group and what has brought them into this precarious position?

Artist Bio: 
Ulrike Möntmann has been realising multi-year projects with partners from art, science and politics in cooperation with drug addicts in European prisons, therapy facilities and reception centres. In interdisciplinary artistic research and practice, complex issues are discussed that arise from the cooperation of all participants. The aim of the investigations is to uncover facts and to identify concrete connections from different perspectives. This is not about confirming the asymmetrical relationships with the women affected which certainly exist or about discussing the measures of the organs of executive power; the aim is to uncover the conditions in societal systems that are unthinkingly taken for granted and accepted.

OUTCAST REGISTRATION is a form of intervention that requires reflection and commentary to reveal the conditions that are structurally entrenched in social processes and make them perceptible as public affairs.

The following are the two main projects devised and conducted by Ulrike Möntmann, in cooperation with incarcerated, drug-addicted women throughout Europe since 1998.

Image 2 & 3


Parcours – Chantal van Lieshout, Joke Beltman, Judith Reijnders, Peter Krynen
Take Me to the Pinball River

Like balls in a pinball machine that are pushed in different directions by each other, our collaboration creates movement in various ways. Based on our own interests and working method, we seek connection in the playful and inquisitive in various materials. Individual art objects and interventions in the space require attention in their own way. The course will work as a generator for our imagination and play, and then for those of the visitors.

The track arises organically during the construction: an obstacle course of works of art as a world full of wonder, stimuli and humor, where people roll out with a big smile, while they wonder what just happened to them.

Starting points for the course include chalk paintings on floors, pinball machines, cardboard parties, inflatable sculptures – just like the course that Beltman and Van Lieshout made in 2022 at exhibition space P–OST in Arnhem. A cakewalk at the fair and a walk in the park were the starting point for this surprising and large installation, with spatial and kinetic works and small videos.

Artist Bio:
PARCOURS is a group of artists of different ages with a playful, inquisitive attitude:

Chantal van Lieshout (29) uses humorous poetry to make the overwhelming inaccessibility of other worlds of experience and of the universe manageable;

Joke Beltman (59) is fascinated by the instability of the work process, failures, combined with glamour, and likes to play with the duality of attraction-horror, irony-seriousness;

Judith Reijnders (27) works from a love for playgrounds and investigates the dialogue with spaces and infrastructures;

Peter Krynen (71) seeks out the confusion in playful machinations and stagings.

PARCOURS grows, after each exhibition new artists are invited to participate, to build new trajectories in varying artist combinations.

Image 5, 6 & 7


Tatjana Macić
Leftovers Initiative

Leftovers initiative is a call into action for research and reflection upon the sustainability of exhibition-making in terms of materials and discourses, founded by the artist Tatjana Macić.

The aim is to engage within a broader art community to improve, inspire and envision more sustainable processes of the production of art. Climate change, child labour, waste economy, global migration and commodification of art production- are the urgent topics the art world is facing today. Exhibitions follow each other up in a certain fashion and speed, producing thereby exhibition displays and offering temporary focus. When an exhibition is over it is built down, and it is time for a reset. After a few days, a new exhibition emerges. The cycle is repeated. However, the urgency of sustainability and the nature of contemporary critical artistic practices expect more durable solutions. We aim to raise awareness about the sustainability of exhibition-making by organising exhibitions, workshops and public programme. Also, we hope to create a (digital) publication and a manual for sustainable exhibition-making, which will serve as an inspiration and guide for artists, art institutions, curators and art academies. We welcome collaborations and are open to flexible solutions and contributions.

Artist Bio: 
Tatjana Macić is a visual artist and writer originally from the country that does not exist any more, and currently based in Amsterdam. She is deploying her artistic practice to blur the boundaries between visual art, theory, exhibition-making, education and language. Work was shown at Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, the Venice Biennale Collateral Events and de Appel in Amsterdam. Tatjana is a lecturer of artistic research and exhibition making at the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague. 

Image 8 & 9


Ayman Hassan and Ghenwa noiré
GAZA

A genocide is in the making – All eyes on Gaza – A genocide is in progress – All eyes on Gaza – A genocide is being applauded – All eyes on our humanity

Artist bio:
Ayman Hassan is a graphic designer and installation artist based between Beirut, Berlin and Amsterdam. Ghenwa Noiré is an audio-visual artist based in Amsterdam. 

Image 10 & 11


Alvaro Ugarte
Curing the Institution
1hr participatory performance

The project “Curing the Institution”, taps into the notion of curing art institutions and their social and power structures in order to reimagine institutional hierarchical systems and their representation. By connecting both staff members and visitors at W139 into a series of “toques toques” – a common practice in Mexico, where collective electroshocks are offered in bars and restaurants as entertainment – the project aims to transform the psychic, mental and emotional state of the participants through a horizontal, collective exercise. The burst of electricity running through the bodies generates shared emotions and physical reactions, acting as a social glue between the participants. “Curing the institution” has been successfully implemented before at Hangar, Lisboa (2021), Jan van Eyck Academie, Maastricht (2022), LagoAlgo, CDMX (2023) and HIAP, Helsinki (2023).

Artist Bio:
Alvaro Ugarte (1984, MX) Is a visual artist interested in analyzing mental structures and social behaviors. His artistic practice often begins as social experiences by staging scenarios or situations to function as devices of engagement between members of a given community. Consequently, the material outcomes, which are often unpredictable due to the nature of the actions and its collective dimensions, may take the form of sculptures, installations, actions, sounds or any other documentary format.

Image 12 & 13

W139 hosts… 2023 – Week 6

Met de tweede editie van W139 hosts… zijn we verheugd onze tentoonstellingsruimte te openen voor een dynamisch zeven weken durend programma dat 55 makers en initiatieven de kans biedt om nieuwe projecten of werk-in-uitvoering te presenteren. Tijdens W139 hosts… betrekt elke week een nieuwe samenstelling van makers en collectieven de tentoonstellingsruimte, die omvormt tot een omgeving die voortdurend in verandering is.

Foto’s door Elodie Vreeburg.


739
” House of ________ ” / ” ________  دار “

This story weaves around a real and public place in Morocco, a place that I can’t make recognizable, inhabited by people I can’t name. It’s a place among all places, incompatible and unsettling, which in its audacious and uncertain visibility proclaims itself in opposition to a hegemonic narrative. In my homeland, as patriarchal norms shape the essence of a hetero and Islamocentric society, a captivating tale endures and exists. Between the mosque’s sacred echoes and the cinema’s realm of possibilities, emerges a timeless haven – an old café known as the House of ___. Here, among oppressed and marginalized souls, torn between who they should be and their burning dreams, a queer community makes itself brazenly visible.

Based on a psychogeographic journey and ethnographic exploration, this project uncovers both tender and harsh realities, while sketching possible horizons of a place that dares to resist societal conventions.

The installation is both a translation of participant observations in the café and a sensory transcription of the experience. It erects a new reality by replaying the idea of image manipulation. An attempt to dismantle one reality in order to construct and unveil another.

Artist Bio: 
739 is a visual artist and designer based in the Netherlands and Morocco. He works in the fields of information design, video-sound installations and videography. His work explores socio-political issues from an autoethnographic and psychogeographic perspective.

Investigating the interaction between culture, bodies and spaces, 739 examines how social and cultural landscapes influence individual identities. His design process takes shape from deconstruction of everyday practices, prevailing narratives and cultural objects, which are then reconfigured, reclaimed and recontextualized to reveal hidden and unmentionable narratives.


Le Bateau
B-Anchored

The graphic novel “Art Attack” and the movie “Captain Mermaids” are artworks inspired by the story of the sailboat “B, The Hundred,” built in 2021 by Le Bateau duo. The two works underline a reflection that fuels the duo practice: How can innovative, upcycled boat collective creation help narrate, understand, and twist sociocultural sexist behaviors and traditions? 

The movie “Captain Mermaids” conveys footage from their sailing trip and interviews from B’s community that reflect their relationship with the watercraft. They produced a film embodying their research in its physical matters and the imaginaries it stimulates. The book “Art Attack” takes a similar approach, unfolding the imaginaries from one event of B’s history, when the boat was exhibited at the Stedelijk Museum. They created a gripping tale of a museum thrown into chaos by a boat’s unknown inhabitants.

Artist Bio: 
Le Bateau duo (Laëtitia Delauney and Aurélia Noudelmann) have a strong curiosity for the conception of experimental boats, often materialized as hybrid spaces, which facilitate new dialogues of creation. Their research conveys the reappropriation of male-dominated crafts. They aim to rethink this patriarchal heritage through learning, skill-sharing, and proposing alternative designs. They are captain mermaids. From march 2024 on, they will be leading a participatory worksite to create a new boat, in a whale shape.  Join and contact them on @_lebateau_ ! 


Mira Thompson
Who Cares? – On Receiving Care

Who cares? presents a collection of drawings, singer and performer Mira Thompson exploring the perspective of being on the receiving end of caregiving practices. She conveys intimate acts and encounters of personal care into sequential, comic-style narratives. She illustrates the conflicting feelings and complexities that come with needing care in her daily life, while countering simplistic thinking when it comes to giving and receiving care. 

The scenes are portrayed from Thompson’s point of view both from how she sees it as well as how it might look from the outside. The drawings balance between cheeky and earnest, showing how both portrayals are ways of coping with the realities of a given moment. The viewer is brought to a seemingly ordinary situation of being assisted with brushing her hair in a public space, when someone comments ‘you are really a queen, aren’t you?!’ Other drawings give a glimpse into intimate moments of receiving care where there’s peaceful silence. 

Thompson started making the drawings out of a desire to articulate these relational, affective encounters of being on the receiving of care that are hard to describe in words, or the grief that’s experienced from witnessing overt or internalized ableism. Asking for help is always considered difficult, but when this help is necessary and considered one-sided, it’s different. Having to relate to people who are providing care means navigating power relations – is it possible to ask for the care that’s desired or is that seen as asking too much? Can I truly express myself or does that mean a risk or loss of needed care? 

Artist Bio:
Mira Thompson (Amsterdam, 1993) is a singer, songwriter and performer. Informed by the tradition of vocal jazz, she is drawn to narrative song and strong poetic and visual elements within music. During her time at HKU Utrecht Conservatory, she developed a fascination for the different ways in which the voice can function as an embodied instrument. Whether written, spoken or sung, Mira wields language to evoke deep and buried feelings with an earnest yet witty approach. In 2019 she released her first EP Festina Lente. Since 2008 she has performed nationally at Mozaïek Theater, Frascati, Casco Art Institute: Working for the Commons, among others, and has toured in Germany and France.

Within her own artistic practice or that of others, cross-disciplinary collaboration is at the heart of Mira’s work. She writes on subjects of disability, language and activism to contemplate a more accessible world, and has published, both print and digital, in Metropolis M, Parool, Change Now, International Documentary Filmfestival Amsterdam, and One World. 

Invested in embodied learning and disability justice, Mira brings into question notions of accessibility and its universality through lectures, workshops and consultancy to organizations, tutors, and students. In addition to providing private singing lessons, she teaches and researches for Amsterdam University of the Arts: Amsterdam School for Theatre and Dance, and DAS Graduate School. Mira is a member of Feminists Against Ableism. She also does access work including voice narration, image descriptions, live captions and transcription.


Manuela Benaim
Shapeshifting

​​Shapeshifting is an opportunity for humans to embody each other, as a tool for self discovery. We are souls trapped in a human costume, this is an invitation to blur the edges of your body and wear someone else’s skin. 

Artist Bio: 
I see humanity as a singular source of energy, separated by a perishable membrane we call Body. My name is Manuela, I was born in 1996 in Caracas, Venezuela.

I am a Sculptor and visual artist, I work with life-casting, sculpting, spfx, painting and garment making to make figurative art. 


Anna Buyvid
No Backup for 601 Days 

The main subject for the show and discussions is uncovering the notion of fear and enclosed spaces. It expands from the apparent global situation to more profound social and political aspects of limitations, propaganda and manipulation. 

As a Ukrainian-born curator, I have a distinct understanding of the “War in Europe” context. And at the same time, I feel that the response to the situation is much broader than those personally affected by the crisis. How do we experience catastrophe away from catastrophe?

Artists try to touch several questions in a comprehensive environment, thinking together and reviling our fears. What is the way to change research’s scope to bring it to the different perceptions in terms of rapidly changing reality, especially now? What collectively are we doing? Or not doing? How can we redefine borders when we find ourselves in an enclosed space? Can we term them “transitional spaces for individuals”? And how artists’ responses will change the perception of admitting their limitations.

Artist Bio: 
Anna Buyvid is a Ukrainian-born curator and researcher based in Amsterdam.

Her curatorial practice is set on the format of self-organizing and alternative exhibition solutions, and research is in sync with curatorial work on the notion of borders. Anna’s goal is to address what can be done through interventions to understand the functional impact and role of boundaries in today’s world, where there are no “natural” borders – all are social constructions delimited by governments and institutions. 

“I consider curating as a discursive practice, inalienable from ideological and socio-political aspects. At the same time, research becomes a media, a category or a form, so new formats of its representation are a vital part of development.”

Anna Buyvid is the curator of No Back Up for 601 Days. 

Artists: Stephan Blumenschein, Sonia Kazovsky, Hannah O’Flynn, Vladlena Sandu, Yaroslav Solop, Berkay Tuncay.


Juliette Hengst
‘De mythe van de Spierbal’ + workshop ‘How to Steekar’

The catchphrase goes ‘Think Smart Not Hard’. It makes me wonder how vital the supposed inherent difference in strength between sexes is when it comes to completing tasks that seem to require it. A person with no car and no ‘male testosterone muscle Strength’ of their own has to find ways to make do, and my artistic practice as a sculptor certainly does, for the collection and use of heavy found materials. My city gives me mattresses, couches, fridges and solid wooden doors, which with the right knowledge can all be transported alone.

As an AFAB person I know how it is to be expected to have no physical strength and have that shape your real capabilities, but now as a more-masculine presenting person, people are quick to assume that there is something different about me that gives me more strength than a cis-woman. 

The difference in physical strength between genders and its consequences seems concrete, decided and unavoidable, but if you look closely it has very little to do with bare muscle power. The mysterious reality and perseverance of this idea is what I am playing with in ‘De mythe van de Spierbal’, and the ‘How to Steekar’ workshop.

Artist Bio: 
Juliette Hengst (they/she) is a visual artist born in Oldenzaal and raised in the Middle east, recently graduated from KABK. The body and electricity, both ubiquitous and intimate, are currently the main subjects of her artistic practice. Through these matters they explore the conventions of danger, when danger is or isn’t tangible, and why people do exactly what is dangerous. Cutting up, playing with and rearranging the rules of safety codes, conceptions of rationality or reason, ancient or present storytelling, and scenes from her neighborhood in The Hague together with a philosophy of foraging for material birth Hengst’s work.


Public Programme:

Baba Boys X GarageNoise
Radioshow/pop up shop (12:00-19:00)

Together Karmel Sabri ,founder of streetwear brand Baba Boys, and Yara Said ,founder of the radio show GarageNoise, collaborate to curate an event which will amplify nuanced and overlapping themes of making noise, using humour to address political situations, and appropriating masculinity. The space will showcase collages by Yara Said and evocative 35mm photography by Karmel Sabri which both delve into the intricate politics of The Levant and masculinity, harmonizing seamlessly with the Baba Boys ethos. Baba Boys will curate a pop up shop in the space where people can browse and buy pieces from the collection. At the heart of the event lies a day-long radio show intervention during ADE, hosted by the charismatic Noise Diva, Yara Said, and streamed through Radio Al Hara. Collaborating with Yara’s radio show GarageNoise, we’ll amplify the voices of exceptional DJs from the Middle East, fostering cross-cultural connections and global engagement beyond Amsterdam. Think taxi music meets noise. Join us in cultivating our vibrant community through immersive experiences that spark dialogue, cultural exchange, and artistic appreciation.

Artist Bio:
Yara Said (1991) graduated in Fine Arts at the University of Damascus and holds a Master’s from Sandberg Institute. Next to artist, sound designer and DJ, she’s is creative director at Salwa. This organisation designs programmes for upcoming artists with a migration background.

Karmel Sabri (1995) received a bachelors of fine arts from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago  and holds a Master’s of art and design from Sandberg Institute. Karmel’s interdisciplinary practice is rooted in the theme of celebration as a method of resistance. She is an event producer, DJ, and the founder of streetwear brand Baba Boys. 


Saturday 21 Oct

Zhana Assaad
Critical Care Reading
Workshop (14:00-17:00)

Zhana’s Tarot reading workshop uses as a method the idea of critical hope; the ability to assess one’s environment from a perspective of justice and equity — values which are highly present in the tarot — as one simultaneously envisions the possibility for a better future. The tarot, as a series of symbols and archetypes, encompasses the entirety of human experience. Interpretation is key and while the tarot can be used for divination, in this workshop it will be used as a form of self care while utilizing themes of critical care in order to shape a more hopeful outlook on certain negative connotations that might arise. Accompanied by an installation on the complexities of the western and eastern origins of occult practices, the workshop focuses on learning in detail the Celtic Cross reading structure. Then, up to 3 cards from various positions will be chosen and analyzed in relation to each other. This unconventional way of reading the cards opens up possibilities for a more intuitive approach as well as curious incidents. In a time when we yearn for more communal and understanding spaces, let us join and find new ways to take care of ourselves and each other. 

Artist Bio:
Zhana Assaad (1996, LB/UKR) is an interdisciplinary artist whose mediums include textile and sound installations. Currently based in the Netherlands, her practice uses Islamic mysticism, individual cultural traditions and values and occult practices to create a belief-system that supports her in darker times. Alongside internal psychology, her research takes into account the complexities of inner experience, growth and personal politics while allowing entry into a world or myths, visions and rituals. 

W139 hosts… 2023 – Week 5

Met de tweede editie van W139 hosts… zijn we verheugd onze tentoonstellingsruimte te openen voor een dynamisch zeven weken durend programma dat 55 makers en initiatieven de kans biedt om nieuwe projecten of werk-in-uitvoering te presenteren. Tijdens W139 hosts… betrekt elke week een nieuwe samenstelling van makers en collectieven de tentoonstellingsruimte, die omvormt tot een omgeving die voortdurend in verandering is.

Foto’s door Elodie Vreeburg.


Andrea López Bernal, Sophia Simensky and Leslie Lawrence
NOVELTELENOVELA

NOVELTELENOVELA is the spontaneous generation of a television soap opera at W139. Using a system designed by Leslie Lawrence, Sophia Simensky and Andrea Lopez Bernal, dramatic scenes of a soap opera are filmed so rapidly in this durational performance that the actors must receive their dialogue through a small earpiece, before immediately repeating them, as they do not have time to learn lines or repeat a take. Scripts for the performance are written by a large language model in AI based on ideas from a cavalcade of invited artists as well as you, the exhibition audience, raising questions of what it means to be possessed by ideological forces and non-human entities at the onset of the age of information pollution.

Artist Bio: 
Leslie Lawrence’s practice is the constant recreation of his own television show accompanied by a permeable and fantastical meta narrative about the performance of its own production.

Sophia Simensky is an artist and set designer whose material research and narrative installations reflect contemporary environmental anxieties through the uncertain histories of colonial extractive processes.

Andrea Lopez Bernal is a performance artist and current Sandberg research fellow in the field of performance and artificial intelligence.


Birna Björnsdóttir, Milena Anna Bouma, Janina Fritz, Ayesha Ghaoul, Elena Giolo, Juan Sebastian Guerrero, Laura Canha Malpique, Peer Vink
Fountains Without Water

When energy forces to break the bonds that hold water molecules together, water evaporates. Water has dried up to leave room for imagination and playfulness, and what is left over are traces of water from the dried-out river in summer, bits of a cold iceberg in Antarctica, or the salty tears on our cheeks. Our fountains that once held water, have now relinquished it, allowing other substances to meander through their channels: wine, metal, salt, or even popcorn.

“Fountains without water” is a group presentation where multiple artists explore the idea of a waterless fountain. The show will consist of a series of sculptures and paintings that explore this theme. By disrupting the symbol of the fountain, we make space for something else, and by doing so explore different narratives. In this group presentation, we use the symbolism of fountains as a way to celebrate change, collaboration, and untried systems. The show is an invitation to imagine new stories together, by presenting different fountains, with everything but water, scattered in space.

Artist Bio:
This group project includes fountains without water by: Birna Björnsdóttir, Milena Anna Bouma, Janina Fritz, Ayesha Ghaoul, Elena Giolo, Juan Sebastian Guerrero, Laura Canha Malpique, Peer Vink.


Los Angles Collective
139-Angles

For W139 hosts, Los Angles Collective curates an extended gathering to showcase trans talent while providing a space for members of the public (trans or not) to appreciate the importance of trans-held spaces in the art scene. The gathering will consist of an ongoing exhibition featuring works by trans artists from diverse disciplines, in addition to a panel talk, performances and intimate readings.

Collective Bio:
Los Angles Collective is an Amsterdam-based, trans-led collective aimed at showcasing and nurturing trans talent. With a strong T4T-ethos, Los Angles Collective aims to not only showcase what our community has to offer, but also create space for the community to blossom, and for our talents to be nurtured.


Laura Grimm
Gift Receiver

Look around you, at the ceiling. Do you see those wooden beams, what trees were they made of and in which forests did they grow? Now look closer at what you are wearing. What fibres are in your garments and how many hands around the world have handled them? Which processes have the elements around you gone through before they ended up here, in this space with you?

This question is hard to answer. The origins, raw materials and processing methods of things in our daily lives are often invisible to us. In order to get closer to the physical origin of my own sculptures, I made Gift Receiver out of unprocessed sheep’s wool sourced from a shepherd in Rotterdam. After participating in the shearing, I cleaned, carded, and dyed the wool before moulding it into the large and colourful sculpture you see before you.

Gift Receiver is made out of sheep’s wool from Rotterdam, natural dyes (blue woad, orange madder, yellow weld), willow branches and boulders.

Artist Bio: 
Laura Grimm is a visual artist whose sculptural practice is infused with elements from her background in fashion and textiles. She utilises techniques such as pattern construction and material production to create sculptures out of natural materials. Though these techniques are normally applied to mass-produced shapes which fit onto the human body, Grimm uses them to create unique sculptural forms which do not adhere to these rules at all.

Grimm lives and works in Rotterdam. Alongside three other artists she set up her own studio in Hillegersberg and now uses the large former garage in this building as her workspace.


Have A Good Dog Press and Friends
People I Care About

People I Care About is the first of a series of events that gathers friends of Have A Good Dog Press in a collaboration exploring the possibilities of sharing and collective learning through publishing. During a week-long program, Have A Good Dog Press will take over the space of W139 and accommodate talks, live-radio and workshops. 

In collaboration with: Ran-Re Reimann (builder, designer), Ilya Stasevich (writer, artist, curator), Gersande Schellinx (bookbinder, writer, designer), Aske Hvitved (artist, radio pickle enthusiast).

Artist Bio:
Dasha Leo (they/them) graduated from the Fine Arts department at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in 2022. Since the beginning of 2021 they have been running a small publishing company called Have A Good Dog Press with a focus on collaborative process in making. Their cross-disciplinary practice evolves around their interest in finding different ways of working together and providing a platform for others. 


Espacio Estamos Bien
Kantoor Of Soft Aspiration

KOSA is a mobile desk that serves as a space for conversations, speculation, and companionship. Our aim is to create an environment that encourages artists, creators, and anyone interested in cooperation to come together and explore unconventional approaches to utilizing available resources. Using Espacio Estamos Bien (EEB) and W139 networks, we will promote the opening of KOSA`s office hours and schedule. Whether by appointment or walk-ins, the Kantoor will be available to all, with the faith of unexpected participants to come in. We invite participants to engage in conversations with us about their works, through casual dialogue, anecdotes, and even gossip. Through this, we can uncover the intimate details of each artist’s production. These conversations will be collected, along with artwork details, CVs, and documentation, to form the KOSA archive. The archive will be a space where different languages, formless artworks, unrelated themes, unknown artists, repeated and unseen themes coexist. In essence, this archive collects processes, opinions rather than knowledge, errors rather than truths, and differences of thought rather than agreements. It is a formality constructed from artists’ CVs and portfolios, an excuse to gather seemingly irrelevant information that can be woven into new narratives through its constant reconfiguration.

Artist Bio:
Espacio Estamos Bien is an art cooperative* and nomadic project space based in Amsterdam, that facilitates gatherings, publications, exhibitions, and other formats. EEB started by plotting around the idea of a new space in Amsterdam –not necessarily a physical one– that could provide an affective and supporting context. A space for those who do not belong in an institutional circuit. A space that is always changing, always moving, but always available. 

EEB is an initiator of conversations and facilitator of situations.

*Autonomous association of persons united voluntarily to form a democratic organization whose administration and management must be carried out in a manner agreed by the members.


Public Programme:

Espacio Estamos Bien (17:00-19:00)
Kantoor Of Soft Aspiration
Vrijmibo

To celebrate the culmination of this process, we will organize a “Vrijmibo” during the public Friday event of W139 hosts, open to everyone who is curious and wants to hang out in a relaxed and spontaneous atmosphere. Attendees can learn about what happened during the open days of the Kantoor, enjoy karaoke sessions, and indulge in cocktails. We believe it is important to provide a space for enjoyment and celebration within our expanded practice, allowing people to perform differently and let themselves go.


Saturday 14 Oct:

Oscar van Leest & Danielle Huyghe
Studies in (dis)Orientation
1.5-2 hrs performance (15:00-16:30)

Oscar van Leest (1994, NL) is an artist based in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. His practice is broadly oriented around the medium of sound, and is informed by the fields of sound design and experimental music, interaction and instrument design and spatial practices.

A series of sonic exercises with the aim to sonify the relation between the body and the physical space it resides in. Gyroscopic and spatial measurements taken from a device worn by a performer are processed and instrumentalized to sculpt sounds that are then propagated into the same space of performance.


Fariborz Karimi
Its just too much
Performance / Installation (13:00-16:00)

It’s just too much’ is the title of an installation and performance as a contentious of Karimi’s research in Amsterdam as part of my research on ‘Self-Censorship.’ This sharing will take place over five days in the space of W139, including a short performance for two days and a continuous installation of texts, sketches, and videos.

Artist Bio:
Fariborz Karimi, born in Tehran, Iran (1990), received his bachelor’s degree in Theater Directing at the University of Tehran (2009-2013). He founded Bohemi Theater Collective with his fellows in 2011 and since then they have produced numerous performances, residencies, and workshops as a collective. Since 2015, his works have been shown in Tehran’s public scene and at many international festivals including ITFoK Festival Kerala, BOZAR institute Brussels (Welcome to Tehran), ACT Festival Bilbao, and ITS Festival Amsterdam. Besides his performance career, Fariborz is the co-founder at Reconnect Festival (2020) as well as the founder and artistic director of Theatricultural Exchange Residency (2017-2019). Currently he is a Master’s candidate at DAS Theater School, Amsterdam University of Arts (2021-2023)..


Friday 13 – Sunday 15 Oct

Suntipede
The Birth of SUNTIPEDE

A three day manifestation as the debut of SUNTIPEDE. Each day, there are several spots open in which Queer and/or BIPOC can reserve a spot leading up to the debut, whether one applies individually or collectively. Depending on the ritual, the spots are reserved at a baseline of €75,-, although they do offer solidarity spots.

Artist Bio:
SUNTIPEDE does not operate as a conventional tattoo studio, but rather uses methods that are more true to pre-colonial tattoo traditions such as applying spiritual protocols. Each entangling our own practice, themes of nostalgia, food, mythology and folklore will be present within the markings. The people who approach our platform are asked to be intentional in receiving their marks. Through a conversation, the particular makeup of the tattoo will be decided on the spot, making each marking unique to the participant. For more information on what is possible, you can contact suntipede@gmail.com.

W139 hosts… 2023 – Week 4

Met de tweede editie van W139 hosts… zijn we verheugd onze tentoonstellingsruimte te openen voor een dynamisch zeven weken durend programma dat 55 makers en initiatieven de kans biedt om nieuwe projecten of werk-in-uitvoering te presenteren. Tijdens W139 hosts… betrekt elke week een nieuwe samenstelling van makers en collectieven de tentoonstellingsruimte, die omvormt tot een omgeving die voortdurend in verandering is.

Foto’s door Elodie Vreeburg.


Aubane Berthommé Martine
The Economy of Tenderness – A Collective Mapping of Social Classes in the Cultural Field

The economy of tenderness” is a collaborative research on the contemporary proletariat, building upon the performance “Seeking Venus”. Invited to perform by Nice Flaps (life drawing collective), I developed, in collaboration with Yassin Niemandsdochter, an interactive performance. The piece reflects on physical conditions of manual workers, self-caregiving, and gazes on Mediterranean women.

Through my interactions with fellow cultural workers, I observe economic and social vulnerability faced by many, especially non-native and non-white artists and curators. We often compromise our health, artistic practice, or economic stability to sustain ourselves to contribute to the cultural scene. This position erases us from established institutions. While many of us are working-class, I notice a lack of [self]-representation of proletarians, and an absence of analysis of power dynamics in terms of classes within cultural spaces.

Nourished by intersectional theories, my research led me to define proletariat beyond an economic position: it gathers any of the categories lacking socio-economic power based on specific identity aspects such as perceived race, gender, etc. Social classes are therefore fluid and constantly re-defined; they are rarely chosen but potentially emancipatory.

I intend to map the classes within the art field, prioritising analysis of concerned individuals by conducting interviews and debates with them. By using this collaborative approach, I aim to stimulate collective thought, present a more accurate portrait of the art scene, and oppose the stigma generated by precarity and “income jobs”. Contributing to a better representation is for me a form of community care that brings tenderness into politics.

Artist Bio: 
Aubane Berthommé Martinez is a working-class artist and curator who approaches arts as socio-political and educational tools. As a multidisciplinary artist, she uses various mediums to explore and re-construct elements defining one’s identity, focusing on gender and sexuality. She gazes at the gaze, reappropriating exotified and historical western aesthetics, honoring her Mediterranean background.

Aubane developed a research-based curatorial practice reinterpreting contemporary social classes via the organizations she co-founded: Squish, a queer-feminist cultural platform; and Kollection Kitsch, an exhibition series making art financially and conceptually more accessible. Through multidisciplinary events, Squish questions identity politics with an intersectional approach, while Kollection Kitsch features working-class artists exploring rejected or mocked aesthetics and themes.

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Tara White
Knowledge Exchange Site: Beyond These Walls There’s Courage

Beyond These Walls There’s Courage is a research project first presented as a solo exhibition at Southwark Park Galleries, London, UK. The show tenderly mapped the entangled dynamics between grief, intergenerational relationships, gender and protest. Operating in the overlaps between these frames of experience, Tara White uses the Anjili Ironwood Tree as a botanical motif to anchor their explorations of grief on both micro and macro scales. Developing on this work, Tara will collate interdisciplinary discussions and visual responses to produce a publication focusing on the Anjili Ironwood tree, which is notoriously difficult to fell, as a symbol of resistance, protest and wisdom in its native West Asian region.

At W139, Tara will hold workshops exploring new modes of communicating protest. Taking inspiration from the Anjili Ironwood specimens in Amsterdam and archival material at Atria and IISH, join Tara to occupy the gallery in a residency-style intervention, where visitors are invited to create their own protest ephemera to commemorate overlooked elders who laid the foundation for our rebellion. We’ll collectively produce a series of imagined protest posters and pin-badges, cascading the wall of the gallery as an ode to those who strived to better the society we inhabit.

Artist Bio:
Tara’s practice interrogates the layers of personal insight, imperial dissolution and grief that exist within the body. Taking form as sculpture, image or set design, they gesture towards multiple possible interpretations simultaneously. Often describing their work as collage, Tara’s practice operates amongst a collection of found, fabricated and personal objects. These talismans of memory, invested with profound significance are suspended in ambiguity. Tara investigates the cultural connotations attached to objects, disrupting canons to invoke alternative meanings.

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Beyond Blackness
Beyond the frame: Exploring Visual Languages and the Inarticulable in the Black Imagination

This project reconvenes graduated artists from the Blacker Blackness temporary masters program. As a constellation of diasporic artists we will initiate a process that unpacks notions of collectivity in art making and sharing. We wish to shift from the standard conventions of art production and exhibiting that simply divides space and best creates a dynamic of spectatorship and move toward a questioning of what making, building and sharing art together as Black artists looks like. We will prioritize an ethic of care and connection that also holds space for the complexity of our experiences as well as our individual artistic desires and  longings.

From this jumping (entry?) point we wish to explore/reveal our working/in progress attempts at articulating a black visual language. We wish to articulate the inarticulable of the Black imagination and what that means for each artist. We wish to show our work as opposed to showing a piece of work. 

We will organize a public program that aims to challenge traditional notions of art as object and delve into the realms of space, community, process, collectivity, spirituality, and healing as praxis.

Artist Bio: 
We are a collective of 12 artists from across the African diaspora. We are quite young and already middle aged. We are mothers and uncles, siblings and daughters. We are queer, married, single, non-binary and CIS. We are new to the art world, or we were kicked out of it, or we left it behind. We are enthusiastically just starting out and we are already jaded. We are freshly traumatized. We are much more than 100 words. We are infinite and inarticulable. Like blackness itself, we are beyond.

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Theetat Thunkijjanukij
Copy Shop

Copy Shop is a small remote studio service that provides manual disassembly, scanning, printing, and copying of the printed matter. The copies appear within larger images, their new compositions distorting familiar, painted narratives. Previously hidden images are now revealed by furniture reconfigured, edited, and augmented. A library of books and records swells out within painted and stacked rectangular wooden boxes: a growing construction of makeshift order. Two easy chairs skirt the room. The single beds rotated to adjacent corners. A single writing desk sits by the windows. The collages were densely worked, each consisting of hundreds of sections cut from newsprint, glossy magazines, and color supplements. Angular shapes were pasted together, forming abstracted and numerously faceted sections framed within larger, further faceted compositions. Evident from the upper layer were the many layers underneath, their edges pressed upwards and highlighted by the varnish. Thicker book papers were used in more sparing quantities, their predominantly black and white images adding larger discordant elements within the main narrative of the collages.

Artist Bio: 
Theetat Thunkijjanukij; an artist, is working on scaling, and reproduction of niche pieces. In Theetat’s work, he emphasizes the methodologies of reproduction as a foundational aspect of graphic design. His works contain inaccuracies originating from the reproduction procedure. While aware of the subversive potential of the disparities with the source as originated by the bootlegging process, Theetat’s subversion of the context he occupies not only brings up questions of the value of the design object but also the production of meaning through the erasure of the original.

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Sarah Emilia Maria Daniela Sølvsten
I Came Walking in Backwards

In the absence of or distance from one’s heritage, illusions and fantasies are created about what is not represented in physical form. There is a need to fill in the gaps, replace the missing pieces and make connections between the fragments. This is where my first narratives about my father’s hometown Maniitsoq in Greenland, were created – in the imagination of a child lacking a wholesome story of a place. I grew up with the Danish colonial name for Maniitsoq, Sukkertoppen (Sugar Peaks), which created an early image of my father coming from a place where mountains were made of sugar. These illusions became a way of grasping the unfamiliar, creating an even greater distance to my family history, the Greenlandic people, and their culture. There are different stages of dealing with this distance, the first being the illusion of the ‘authentic’ shaped and influenced by the outsider’s observations and narrations of the ‘foreign’. “I came in walking backwards” aims to visualise and concretise these early-stage imaginaries and is a series of works dealing with the position of the intersecting or the “third culture kid”. The goal is to make the private public through a common ground defined by the personal imaginary.

Artist Bio: 
I work in the intersection of performance, live installation, and sculpture. Utilising influences and experiences from the performing arts, I explore movement and behaviour related to the history and memory of our ancestors and their impact on us.

My works depict the overlaps of tradition, mythology, and lifestyle, addressing how they are intertwined with the mediation and production of identity through new technologies and circulations of forms. Thus, my practice acts as a space for reflection on processes of transition, hybridisation and transformation, pushing these questions into material investigations of the ‘third culture child’ and other intercultural issues.

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Public Programme:

Arthur Guilleminot
Piss Soap Workshop
4 hour workshop
14:00 – 18:00

Throughout the entire Piss Soap workshop, the basics of ecodeviance will be presented and exemplified throughout the process of saponification. We will review the possibility for local and tangible regenerative design, circular ecology and how to tackle the climate crisis while providing cleaning products. The workshop will present the full process of saponification and the steps required to transform domestic waste into usable soap. We will mix the various ingredients and create a circular process informed by waste management. The participants will have the opportunity to create intimate and personal outcomes from their own (bio) wastes. At the end of the workshop, everybody will come back home with 750g of soap to cure at home. After the 3 months needed to its complete maturation, the soap will be ready to be used for washing.

Sign up by sending an email to: piss.soaps@gmail.com

Artist Bio:
Arthur Guilleminot is an ecodeviant artist and positive maverick that practices fertile and generative disobedience. Intersecting disciplines such as design, performance, fashion, and visual art, he creates provocative visuals and vulnerable semantics, casting transilient pleasureful futures for our world. He proposes radically regenerative approaches to meet our present and persistent need for change. After his art studies at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy, his work is currently researching tools for decolonizing disgust, through “Camp” aestheticism and buffoonery. These tools can be used to explore and harvest the subtleties of disgust to make us kinder in trusting our visceral impulses, disregarding imposed norms of being and keeping an active hope.


Saturday 14 Oct:

Sarah Emilia Maria Daniela Sølvsten
I Came in Walking Backwards — Cut, copy and paste
Workshop (13:00-16:00)

In a figurative sense, we use a kind of ‘cut, copy and paste’ method to understand the unknown and to create a relationship with it. We take a sample of what we know and place it next to the unfamiliar; it becomes neither the unknown nor the known but a fusion of the two. In this way, what I have chosen to call ‘the third imaginary’ arises, inspired by Pia Arke’s (1996) term ‘the third place’. ‘The third imaginary’ exists in the meeting ground between two or more cultures, languages, countries, and traditions. For many of us, this meeting ground is indescribable or intangible, and for that reason, it often remains in our imagination. At the same time, we are the physical representation of these imaginaries, but how do they take shape or visualize? How do they become language?

As part of the W139 Hosts program, I will, On Saturday 7th of October, from 1 p.m. to 4 p.m. in the room upstairs on location, host a workshop. In this workshop, we will focus on some of ‘the third imaginary’ complexities and their inherent dualities, contrasts, and conflicts. We will each invent poetic fable beings and use Ursula K. Le Guin’s writing exercises from “The Sound of Your Writing” (1998) as a guideline, as well as read, collectively, parts from ‘Image, Social Imaginary and Social Representation’ by Angela Arruda and ‘Goodbye, Little egg, Goodbye’ by Gabriela Wiener. At the end of the workshop, we each share our writing. As I wish to keep an intimate space with time for reflection and sharing of everyone’s contribution, there is a maximum of 10 participants.

W139 hosts… 2023 – Week 3

Met de tweede editie van W139 hosts… zijn we verheugd onze tentoonstellingsruimte te openen voor een dynamisch zeven weken durend programma dat 55 makers en initiatieven de kans biedt om nieuwe projecten of werk-in-uitvoering te presenteren. Tijdens W139 hosts… betrekt elke week een nieuwe samenstelling van makers en collectieven de tentoonstellingsruimte, die omvormt tot een omgeving die voortdurend in verandering is.

Foto’s door Elodie Vreeburg.


Sabina Scorțanu
Disembodied Voices From Beyond the Horizon

The Ionosphere is a natural electromagnetic field, existing at the intersection of Earth and Space. Because it contains particles ionized by solar radiation, it acts as a mirror shield for the Earth, protecting it from UV rays, reflecting radio communication and hosting satellites. In my work I investigate the role of the ionosphere as a storyteller, by creating a hyperlocal radio station, composed out of three radio-satellites which re-broadcast disembodied voices from Earth and Space. These stories have been collected from local radio stations, international broadcasts and from the outer space, either bouncing off the ionosphere or passing through it. With this project I am bringing together the local, global and spatial voices, in an attempt to re-create the constant fight for communication dominance between radio waves within the spectrum. I am revealing the discontinuous material reality of the Ionosphere, as a storytelling zone with a temporal dimension, that hosts, shifts, propagates, activates and distorts the voices and signals passing within it, therefore uncovering the ghostly inconsistent nature of the atmosphere as a medium of transporting information and building infrastructures that clash with each other as a result.

Artist Bio
Sabina Scorțanu is a Moldovan-Romanian graphic designer and multimedia artist from Moldova, based in the Netherlands. Her work emerges from a fascination with the transient nature of objects and phenomena, and how their fluctuations are perceived through human engineered tools, that react and communicate with volatile environments. These phenomena exist on the spectrum where humans shape the ecosphere, particularly Earth weather, and its interaction with living and non-living matter, and how inherited local knowledge, transforms into speculative and visionary modes of existence. These visions are orchestrated through storytelling acts shaped by audiovisual works, radiophonic installations and digital spaces.

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Pernilla Manjula Philip
Post-purposing Pump-station

Do-It-Yourself (DIY) medical tools can be realised through Open Source solutions. This can be somewhat misleading, as it implies both independence and a solution-centric methodology. Shifting perspective, I examine these tools not merely as solutions, but as responses to underlying issues. Why do individuals, like myself, opt for these alternatives, and what are the realities, reasons, and possibilities that drive this choice?

Hacked medial hardware is interwoven with a community of users and developers and is contingent on the production lines of proprietrary products. I this installation, the production line of medical aid is reproduced by methods of DIY, challenging the idea of medical treatment/management as fast-moving and successfully using cutting-edge (certified, proprietrary) technological solutions. Disabled people are hackers out of necessity. Self-diagnosis, online research, and adapting/hacking of medical tech is common practice for many of us.

Artist Bio:
I use my lived experience as a starting point for researching the intersection of chronic illness and the biomedical industrial complex.

I am particularly motivated by ways of hacking and tinkering as collaborative tools of activism and how this informs new structures of collective-care.

Operating out of Amsterdam, my roots span from Sweden and South Africa, contributing to my identity as an artist and designer.

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Michiel Teeuw with Maaz Jan
Pulled Plots

How do you treat a line from a ruler on a land?

Pulling Plots shows different works relating to land ownership & division, geometric mapping and homophobia. The exhibit centers around a map by mayor Rudolf de Mepsche of Faan (Groningen), who sentenced 21 sodomites (homosexuals) to death in 1731. Which role did his land ownership play in the process? Do systems of land privatisation produce colonial violence against gendered minorities?

On show are various drawings, videos and an artist book. During the exhibit, a performance and conversation will take place as well. The exhibit also shows the first result of a collaboration with architect and artist Maaz Jan, about borders, lines, ruins and land.

This exhibit is part of Michiel Teeuw’s MONSTER ARCHIEF, an artistic research into the “Monsterproces van Faan”. In this process, which took place in 1731, Groningen (NL), 21 sodomites (homosexuals) were sentenced to death by mayor Rudolf de Mepsche. In the project, Michiel both gathers and processes archival materials, as well as producing new work about the process and its related concerns. In this, he invites different people to exchange their perspectives and knowledge – building a network of information.

Artist Bio:
Michiel Teeuw is an artist, designer and researcher. He likes to read and think. His work fosters a tactile, direct and critical engagement with the systems around him/us/you.

Maaz Jan is an architect, artist and illustrator. Through photography, drawing and architecture, Jan’s practice captures his daily life and the surroundings of Karachi (PK). 

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Intimidation Tactics
Sperm Stains on Cotton Last Forever, Ritualistic Sperm Staining of the Ancient Indus Valley

Sperm stains on cotton last forever traces the connection between fertility and sexuality of land and people, as seen in ancient cotton farming practices of the Indus Valley around 2500 BCE. In 1929 British archeologist Sir John Marshall excavated the oldest fragment of woven cotton at the archeological site of Mohenjo-Daro in the Indus valley. During the excavation Marshall also found clay tablets with depictions of cotton cloth and sleeping ithyphallic figures showing fertility rituals related to nocturnal emissions or ‘wet dreams’. The prevailing puritanical morals of the British Crown and the imperial intentions to reframe Indian history to suit the British colonial ambition, resulted in censorship of these wild histories. The link between cotton cultivation and the belief of the Indus people in the power of sexual imagination, destabilized the colonial categorical division between man and land, between human fertility and that of the soil. This video documentary work and accompanying lecture re-traces these connections and documents the ancient history of ritualistic sperm staining of the ancient Indus Valley.

This work is part of the Birth of Cotton project , which delves into the history of cotton farming in India and the current cotton farming crisis due to industrialized farming practices that have aggressively reshaped the rural Indian landscape.

Project Duration:
15-20 minutes 

Artist Bio: 
Intimidation Tactics is a post-critical theatre collective with no regard for disciplinary boundaries. Extensive research is transformed into a constellation of works: installations, theatre, conferences, parties and publications etc. The purpose of these experiments is to conjure reasonable doubt within established ways of knowing by asking: “How the Fuck did we end up here?” I_T hopes to produce new ways of collective thinking that can hopefully rescue us from a world that is perpetually in crisis. Many projects use commonplace materials, digital technologies, speculative writing and poetry to examine the complexities of globalisation in a postcolonial time.

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Carl-Johan Paulsen / Leo Patra
Drag Pavilion for Curious Beings and Lovers

A House of Hope is an installation in which garments, purses, shoes and wigs are woven together creating a piece which relates to the safety network that a drag house can be. The work examines the fundamentals of creating a performative yet self-expressive identity. By taking the outfits and objects out of the clubs, the work expands the notions of house, family, queerness and belonging. All garments in the installation have been borrowed from the members of The House Of Hopelezz. For w139 hosts… the installation will be turned into a Drag pavillion for curious beings and lovers. Friday evening the pavilion will be turned into a drag stage with performances by Leo Patra and other queens. On saturday curious beings and lovers are invited to come and explore drag, gender performativity and self exploration through various exercises such as; Wear your desires, Giving and receiving face, Blindfolded dance-off, Spinning your own fate, and others. 

A special thanks to Club Church, The House Of Hopelezz and to my sisters and mothers; Jennifer Hopelezz, Taka Taka, Lady Bag, Aryelle Freeman Hopelezz, Sasa Hara, Indie Nile, Banana Mouskouri, Dynno Dada, Bustie La Tish, Hellena Mirrix, Angelina Loqui, Grizolda, Sletlana, LatinX Charm and Jiji Jitsu for donating the clothes.

Artist Bio: 
Carl-Johan Paulsen (b. 1998) is a student at the art academy Gerrit Rietveld Academie, and temporarily a student at SNDO. Carl-Johan works as a drag performer under the name Leo Patra at Club Church, among other venues. Their art practice revolves around themes such as queerness in mythologies, curiosity about religious and spiritual systems, finding space in a non-binary body, public sexuality and camouflage of identity. Carl-Johan has a strong curiosity for the research and making of textiles. Through karting, spinning, dyeing and knitting they question the stories that surround us, the bodies we inhabit and the society at large. 

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Public Programme:

Big Toilet Radio (12:00-19:00)

Join us at the Big Toilet Radio event at W139, for a captivating full-day live broadcast. Immerse yourself in a diverse lineup featuring DJ sets, live performances, and talk shows that will shine a spotlight on local underground talent while fostering a sense of community. The event aims to celebrate creativity, encourage connections, and expand the horizons of community radio. This isn’t just an event; it’s a platform to explore the dynamic facets of art and culture, and to engage in meaningful conversations. Be a part of this endeavor to amplify voices, strengthen bonds, and explore the uncharted territories of community radio’s potential. Come hang out with us in W139 and listen and engage live to the broadcast.

Artist Bio:
Big Toilet is an independent freeform community radio based in Amsterdam Nieuw West. Founded by Goy Tung and Eurico Sá Fernandes. Our mission is to highlight exceptional local underground talent by giving the contributor total autonomy over their show’s content. This approach leads to a vibrant lineup that embraces a variety of forms, includes DJ sets, interviews, discussions, live acts, and even culinary presentations. We host and air episodes biweekly from our studio in Amsterdam Nieuw West, while occasionally special editions are held at diverse venues to engage a broader audience.

Image 12 & 13


Saturday 30 Sept:

Elisa Piazzi
The Universal Non-Authoritarian Declaration of Human and More-Than-Human Rights
1.30hrs performance

The Universal Non-Authoritarian Declaration of Human and More-Than-Human Rights (UN-ADH&M-T-HR) is an ongoing and collective project that seeks to address the deficiencies of the original Universal Declaration of Human Rights established in 1948. Through collaborative moments of re-inscription and co-writing, I extend an invitation to all beings to participate in updating, questioning, and reflecting on what a new declaration would require to be truly all-encompassing. Constantly undergoing translation and updates, the UN-ADH&M-T-HR will remain a work in progress, perpetually evolving to meet the ever-changing needs and values of our diverse world.

Artist Bio:
Elisa Piazzi (IT, 1996) is an artist and practice-based researcher interested in processes of meaning-making, knowledge-circulation and (mis-/re-)interpretation.

With a particular emphasis on semiotics, Elisa works with signs, structural norms and social customs to explore the notion of universality. Learning (and listening) through making, Elisa perceives her practice as a space for personal and mutual re-understanding where contrasting meanings and opinions can exist equally and harmoniously next to each other. 

Informed by a meticulous preliminary research that combines theory, workshops and public discussions, her work is materialised through self-publishing, drawing and installations.