The exhibition “Dug up brief drop” stems from a collective curiosity: how can heat, thoughts, emotions, grief, or decay — forces that are intangible yet deeply felt — be translated into material form?

Join us for the opening of “Dug up brief drop” on Friday 4 July from 5pm.

With works by Huub Kooijman, Will Peck and Janina Frye.
And an accompanying text by Masha Ryabova.

Hope to see you here.

Supported by AFK

Exhibition open: 14, 15 and 19–22 June, 2–6 pm

Part of the airWG series

isn’t all land holy, every structure a temple explores dwelling through the lens of ownership, memory, wildness and pseudo-ritualisms.

The exhibition follows an intimate narrative between pre-built spaces and sacred ones, using found and sought objects, moving image and sound to consider their contemporary entanglement. Additionally the work seeks to question what entitles us to land and how built dwelling spaces impose on their occupants.

The artist integrates the imagery of a ‘round’ — an encircling of a sacred or holy space (usually) in an anticlockwise fashion — as a guide within the gallery through a series of personal encounters with embodied memories of owned and pre-built spaces. This round is mirrored in a video work in which the performer navigates a grocery store. Filmed from the perspective of a colonial cartographer, a top-down mapping is shown of the space in which the land is viewed as a lifeless commodity.

Brooches fashioned out of car seat buckles cling to the walls of the gallery space and harvested brambles lie bundled beneath a replica of a wrench tool used in colonial rope making. 

Along with this the artist provides a series of personal artefacts of entitlement, a childhood carseat and phonebook records referencing one E.Mccoy— presumed architect of their family home.

From the rear of the car seat, boiled, sterilised dirt spills outward. Planted within is the seed of a lone hawthorn tree — a species long associated in Irish folklore with the Aos Sí, descendants of the Tuatha Dé Danann. 

Such hawthorns remain scattered across modern, commercial pastures — left undisturbed not by law, but by folklore, superstition, and quiet reverence.

Writer and poet Max Mccabe responds to the work with a written text read by the artist’s mother in an accompanying sound piece.

 Photos: Studio Plancius

Exhibition Open: 16–18 May and on request on 23 and 24 May

Part of the Open Call series

By hard experience they had learnt that isolated efforts were doomed to failure,
— C.L.R. James, The Black Jacobins

senakirfa A. & S*an D. Henry-Smith present new works in collaboration grounded in the poetics of hands and the logics of their phonic exchange. What precedes their collaboration is a shared collection of resonances kept in and held by poetry, field recordings, objects, and photographs.

senakirfa A. is an interdisciplinary artist and poet whose work is grounded and explores the poetics of African Diasporic world-making in Amsterdam. A.’s work across sculpture, screenprinting, zine-making, and writing is an extension of A.’s poetry practice, through which A. explores and centers poetic in(ter)ventions. A. is currently awarded the 3Package Deal Fellowship by the Amsterdams Fonds voor de Kunst.

S*an D. Henry-Smith (b. 1992, New York) is an interdisciplinary artist based in Amsterdam, working across poetry, photography, sound, and performance. They earned an MFA from the Sandberg Instituut and have exhibited at ROZENSTRAAT (2023) and White Columns (2021). Their book "Wild Peach" (2020) was shortlisted for the PEN Open Book Award. Henry-Smith has received numerous fellowships, including from Amsterdam Fonds voor de Kunst and the Fulbright Program. Their work, rooted in Black and queer creative legacies, explores themes of witness, improvisation, and resistance against systems of exploitation. Engaging with histories of Black migrations, Henry-Smith rejects traditional representations of suffering or excellence, instead embracing slowness, memory, and nonlinear narratives. Their practice unfolds through photography, writing, sound, and installation, creating layered, multisensory experiences.

Photos: Studio Plancius

Opening Times: 30 March, 5 & 6 April, 12 & 13 April, 19 & 20 April. 13:00-18:00.

Part of the Open Call series

Each week in April, Maria Zandvliet, Lyckle de Jong, Kim David Bots and G.C. Heemskerk will create and perform a new musical theater piece. Which will be filmed by DOP Sjuul Joosen. Each piece consists of music, text, costumes, lighting, scenery and props, which are made on site. The remains of the performances — sets, costumes, props and (video) documentation — form a weekly, changing exhibition.

Each performance has its own storyline, inspired by the history of the WG site, market forces in healthcare and the aesthetics of healthcare environments. The pieces are episodic and connected, but can also be experienced separately. We work sequentially from the themes: Healthy, Sick, Death and The Afterlife. After the exhibition we will make a film, enriched with sound design, drawings and music, seen as a powerful tool for knowledge transfer.

Performances:

1. Gezond (30 March 16:00)
2. Ziek (6 April 16:00)
3. Dood (13 April 16:00)
4. Het Hiernamaals (20 April 16:00)

In our society today, there is a strong emphasis on health. Buildings are designed for healthy, human bodies, with limited consideration for individuals who are supposedly 'deviant'. This is also true in everyday life, where strict standards determine what is considered deviant or healthy, what is considered natural and what is not. These images influence not only the design of our buildings and public spaces, but also how we are allowed to behave, what gender we are assigned, how we feel, and whether we are excluded or given more opportunities. By playing with the idea of health and illness, we challenge these normative frameworks and create an absurdist narrative that opens up new possibilities. We ask questions such as: Why is health seen as the responsibility of an individual? Isn't it eminently a social thing? This is a core part of our method: we constantly take on different roles, trying to be something we are not ourselves, thus empathically putting ourselves in the shoes of a “sick” or “healthy” Other. Perhaps fiction is the best way to really feel what it is like to be in a different situation. Fiction can thus even be seen as a powerful tool for knowledge transfer.

The artists are supported by the Mondriaan Funds and Stroom Den Haag.

Photos by Studio Plancius (www.studioplancius.com).