atelierWG Foundation invites artists working in any medium to organize an exhibition at puntWG, an exhibition space located in the centre of Amsterdam in the period from September 2021 - September 2022. puntWG provides a platform for artists to temporarily own the space with a sense of freedom and responsibility, to give form to their own program and make contact with the public.

We encourage proposals for duo and group exhibitions to stimulate dialogue between artists and their work. Proposals for one-person presentations are also possible on the basis that artists seek interaction with other (relevant) individuals or groups through their program. Proposals that include a diverse public program of events such as artist talks, performances, screenings or (performative) lectures are preferred. Since circumstances have changed due to the Covid-19 pandemic, we invite applicants to consider alternative ways to connect with an audience while still taking Corona safety measures into account.

Artists are selected on the basis of the quality of their proposal and their considered approach to using the space. Each exhibition will last four weeks (including installation and deinstallation times). This call is not intended for curated group exhibitions or exhibitions that have previously been shown in other spaces.

Support:

The organization of both puntWG and Foundation atelierWG almost fully depends on volunteers. atelierWG Foundation provides selected artists with an open platform to realize their projects at puntWG. This includes the space and basic equipment, professional photo documentation & invigilation. Additionally all exhibitions and side programmes will be shared on our website and instagram page. As a small non-profit organization run by a team of artists, we are able to offer selected exhibitions a modest budget towards the production costs. To further aid the realisation of each exhibition, puntWG’s team will issue acceptance letters for successful applicants to support their applications for external funding. 

You can find the puntWG floor plan HERE.

Application guidelines:

Please send ONE pdf (max 10 mb) which includes the following documents in your email  submission. (Please do not include text in the body of your email as part of your application):

•       Full name, date and place of birth, postal address, phone number, e-mail and website
•       CV, max two A4 pages per participating artist
•       A proposal (max. 250 words) that includes a description of your exhibition and the public programme. Please be concise.
•       A short motivation for showing at puntWG.
•       A maximum of five supporting images or links to moving image, sound, or performance pieces, (max. 5 mins each) for each participating artist. Please do not send websites. 
•       Please indicate your preferred months for the exhibition and the times when you are not available. The more accurate you are, the better we can organize the calendar.

- Please indicate if you at the time of this application have already (partly) secured funding for the exhibition.

- In case of group projects, please indicate which artists have confirmed their participation

Proposals to be emailed to opencall@atelierwg.nl

The submission deadline is 10 Feb 2021.

All recipients will be notified before 1 April 2021 .

For general information and questions regarding puntWG, contact team puntWG: opencall@atelierwg.nl 

Organization and programming of puntWG: Lily Lanfermeijer, Mila Lanfermeijer, Michelle Son, Maaike Anne Stevens and Tao G. Vrhovec Sambolec.

About

Following the relocation of the hospital Wilhelmina Gasthuis in 1984, now the AMC – Academic Medical Center – artists, small business owners and residents have shaped and preserved the unique character and special site of WG in Amsterdam. Today a large number of artists are living and working on the grounds, including those who are part of atelierWG (in Pavilions 18 and 19).

AtelierWG Foundation, established in 1989, houses 120 artists' studios as well as initiating projects in the fields of art and culture, including international exchanges and Open Studio routes.

In 2006 puntWG was created as an interdisciplinary exhibition space and platform for the arts, with a lively program of exhibitions, performances, concerts, lectures and discussions with the aim of initiating an open and broad discourse between artists and the public. PuntWG was initiated by the artists of atelierWG, who finance the space and organize its programming.

airWG, an artist-in-residence, opened in September 2015, hosting a guest studio for national and international artists with an emphasis on research and collaboration.

puntWg and airWG are kindly supported by Mondriaan Fonds.

I sit here and hurt, unable to tell you what you want to hear. Use me but take me as I am. A human-made hand may crystallise my shape whilst men without machines stretch me. I don't mind being cut, I like to multiply although I much prefer to mutate. When I am miscarried, I stick to rocks and I don't let go. Sometimes I have a voice but they always tell me what to say. I sit here, like wanting to but not, if that makes sense. Wanting to have a speech but knowing it would never be mine. Wanting to be real but preferring to remain a fantasy. Wanting to stand still but sure I won't pervert the endless desire to metamorphose. Wanting to change my structure but only to be seen with different eyes. The one perpetual thing is my life in the forest where I can forever resist to individuate and rather continue scratching the veil of your fantasies, like rodents clawing at walls and doors.

This exhibition deconstructs the elements of cinema by appropriating parts of its language to emphasise their potential to suggest a world. Wanting to but Not presents words, scenography, and objects that recall cultural references to nonexistent places such as those of other planets or the ones created in virtual reality. We play in between the power of the visual to generate the narrative and the non-visual to evoke images. We see fantasy as a life experience that exceeds and corrupts social norms and patterns.

Event 
Reading and Music Performance

14 February 2021, 19h

This event aims to activate Helena Grande's text and make it available to the public in a different form. We will invite other artists to present their text-based work.

Due to the lockdown the opening times of the exhibition Enfleshed - Elaborated have changed . 

puntWG will be closed until the 18th of november 2020. From 19 Nov till 6 Dec 2020 puntWG will be transformed to a sensory environment that functions as incubator of other knowledge and experiences (subsensorial installation, music of the Urals, film, poetry, essays and stories, shamanic Manchurian music and interventions).

Open: Friday-Sunday, 14:00-18:00

There's also PDF documentation of this collaborative exhibition, including images, esseys, stories and poems and links to video and sound works. Download it HERE.

Enfleshed is a multisensory exhibition reflecting on shamanisms of Inner Mongolia and Manchuria (Northern China) in relation to the serious pollution, electromagnetism, heavy industry and rare-earth mining in the region, global capitalism and the artist’s own body. 

Central in the exhibition is Kristiina Koskentola’s film, Flesh and Metal. Light and Oil. (2020) in which rituals such as for example the healing ceremony of Shaman Liu (who, embodied as her Fox God, healed the artist’s shaking hands) dialogue, drumming and singing intertwine with atmospheric electronic soundscapes and (industrial) landscapes. The film examines the potential of ‘non-living’ or 'spectral' subjectivities and time as active political and ethical actors and agencies. It searches for a deeper relationship with natural and spiritual worlds through alternative knowledges and explores the boundaries of human rationalism and knowledge production and the environmental injustice and slow violence of the logic of (global) capitalism. The film draws on dialogues with involved shamans, healers and musicians, local knowledge, lived experience, nonhuman knowledge and theorising by Karen Barad, Rosi Braidotti, Rick Dolphijn and Jussi Parikka.

puntWG will be transformed to a sensory environment that functions as incubator of other knowledge and experiences and  as a space for healing.

This inquiry is further expanded and sensitised in installations of the program Enfleshed- Elaborated. 

Event
Public Program as Installations 
Fetauring: Zoénie Deng, Rick Dolphijn, Mark Kremer, Pia Lindman, Jussi Koitela, Han Xiaohan, German Popov, Bo Wang
Integrated into the exhibition throughout its opening times

Enfleshed-Elaborated is a programme as installations consisting of essays, healing sessions, music performances, interventions and poetry. It is a programme in which, for example, theory might become a poem, an essay a recipe, ancient Manchurian and Uralic music a contemporary soundpiece and a bone setting session of Finnish oral tradition an installation of the subsensorial.     

Group of artists, philosophers, cultural theorists, researchers, musicians and curators from Eurasia were invited to reflect on the context of the exhibition Enfleshed – in words and bodies, in flesh. They have delved, among other, into diverse ideas of closeness to nature, spirituality, and the conflicting realities created today’s global economy, as well as the power structures of knowledge and science.

Supported by: Amsterdams fonds voor de kunst, Kone Foundation, Finnish Cultural Foundation, Avek.

Photo documentation by Ilya Rabinovich.

PLEASE! REMEMBER TO FOLLOW THE COVID-19 PROTOCOL
Announce your visit by sending an email to enfleshedelaborated@gmail.com

GUIDELINES VISITOR - KEEPING YOU SAFE! 
In adherence to the protocol for cultural spaces due to COVID19 we kindly request you to consider the following before and during your visit; Refrain from visiting when you are experiencing (minor) health issues such as a head cold, a runny nose, a cough, a sore throat, a raised temperature or fever, and/or shortness of breath. You are required to always keep a minimum distance of 1.5 meters from other visitors and staff and wear your mask.

With the aim of giving visibility and opportunity to international artistic production for artists with different career levels, as well as establishing alliances that expand our radius of action, artist residency programme airWG will welcome the 15th edition of the Miami New Media Festival 2020 CENSORSHIP Art and new media censorship in the information age, from this 30th of October to November 1st at puntWG , 5:00 p.m. to 8:00 p.m. Daily.

Thanks to the invitation from Jimmy Yánez, International Official Curator & Museographer for the insular and Caribbean representation, we will show a selection of 9 video artworks by artists from different countries. This 15th edition also includes a special guest, Olga Gabrielle (Aruba) with recent artwork entitled SOTAVENTO.

The Miami New Media Festival is a multimedia platform held in Miami by Arts Connection Foundation since 2006.

PLEASE!
REMEMBER TO FOLLOW THE COVID-19 PROTOCOL,
We are allowed a maximum of 4 visitors inside the space at the same time. Announce your visit by sending an email to airwg@atelierwg.nl.

GUIDELINES VISITOR - KEEPING YOU SAFE!
In adherence to the protocol for cultural spaces due to COVID19 we kindly request you to consider the following before and during your visit; Refrain from visiting when you are experiencing (minor) health issues such as a head cold, a runny nose, a cough, a sore throat, a raised temperature or fever, and/or shortness of breath. You are required to always keep a minimum distance of 1.5 meters from other visitors and staff and wear your mask.

We live in a time where death is referred to as a statistic. Never have we been more aware of the fragility of life and yet to many of us death remains a notion as abstract as ever.

Throughout history there have been diverse practices that meditate on death as a way to accept the transitory nature of life. It is believed that by practicing dying one becomes able to see through one's fear and move beyond it.

The audio installation This body that once was you is such an exercise in dying. Seated in a field of fine bone dust - originating from human bone - the visitor visualizes her/his own body after death. Babs Bakels (artist and former curator of funerary museum Tot Zover in Amsterdam) and Vibeke Mascini (artist and writer) based their installation on The nine cemetery contemplations, a Buddhist meditation from the Maha Satipatthana sutta that focuses specifically on physical detachment and death consciousness. Bakels and Mascini underwent the meditation under the guidance of the American Zen priest Joan Halifax. It begins with the phrase “You died today” and follows the body's disintegration into nine stages, up to the moment when bones become dust and dissolve completely in their environment.

The decomposition process is described plastically, but what happens on a biological and molecular level when our body falls apart? In what way do we return into the elementary chain? Which chemical processes coincide with this? Bakels and Mascini have asked scientists and other specialists to respond to the stages of decomposition described in the The nine cemetery contemplations. 

This body that once was you is the result of these conversations: an intimate audio experience available for one person at the time. In a spoken stream of conscience the listener is guided from the last breath to the transformation into shiny beetles and fragments of DNA in the universe.

All matter is impermanent, scientists, philosophers and Buddhists alike agree on this. To what extent have us mortals internalized this notion, can we embrace death as the formative principle of life? Reflecting on the question “what is death”, This body that once was you reveals a reality in which death has a tangible place.

The individual audio experience lasts approximately 30 minutes and is accessible free of charge and by appointment on: 17, 18, 23, 24 and 25 October from 11: 00-18: 00. Time slots can soon be booked on the Facebook event page This body that once was you, or via thisbodythatoncewasyou@gmail.com

Photographic documentation by Ilya Rabinovich

Friday 02/10, 19:00:  Drum-n-Pix, Pixeltrance or Expressionistic Minimalism on a Subpixel ,  performance by Maxim Tyminko
Saturday & Sunday:  14h-19h 
Sunday 04/10, 18:00: Finissage

Toon Fibbe & Laura Wiedijk, Céline Mathieu, Maxim Tyminko Presented by: La Cocina. [Lore Gablier I Alejandro Ramírez]

Not LESS-MATERIAL marks the opening of the festival ‘A Matter of (In)digestions’ organised by La Cocina in different venues in Amsterdam in October-November 2020. With the festival, we want to call attention to what we tend to take for granted – that is, what we consume –, and highlight some of the socio-political, historical and cultural intersections that consumption implies. What do our appetites tell us about taste and infrastructure, crops and identity, recipes and botanics?

At PuntWG, we present installations and performances by Céline Mathieu, Toon Fibbe & Laura Wiedijk, and Maxim Tyminko. Drawing on the phenomena of online communities driven by erotic fantasies, on homeopathic practices and on algorhythmic calculations at machinic speed, the artists invite us to reflect on consumption in relation to fluid and more volatile objects such as songs, beliefs, desires, or data. How do these objects change and evolve over time? How do they consume and move themselves from place to mind, from mind to space? 

Toon Fibbe & Laura Wiedijk sound installation, To Stick My Head Into Your Mouth and Lick Your Tongue, elaborates on the phenomenon of Vorarephilia: the desire and fetish of being swallowed up in one piece. Unable to fulfill such a desire, vorarephiles perform their fantasy by way of collective fiction. Bewitched by fear and excitement, a question arises: Is the desire to dissolve into something larger than oneself a form of surrender, or is it a courageous attempt to oppose the pervasive force of hyper-individualism? 

Alluding in her title to the process of diluting a substance in a homeopathic preparation, Céline Mathieu presents 7 CH (Airwaves, Person, Flowers, Homeopathy, Technics SL-1200, Test Press of ‘Blusens Fasong’ by Gaute Granli): a series of liminal gestures that explore, through sound and space interventions, the invisible ‘effect’ of the act of feeding – be it mind or space.

Maxim Tyminko presents an iteration of his installation and performance Drum-n-Pix, Pixeltrance or Expressionistic Minimalism on a Sub-pixel Level, in which he delves into Vernor Vinge’s utopian/dystopian concept of technological singularity: a moment when machine intelligence surpasses the cognitive capacities of the human brain. Exploring the process of digesting visual data, the piece is an inquiry into the logic behind A.I. image analysis that evolves into a psychedelic experience of repetitive rhythmic audiovisual patterns.

Check the full program of ‘A Matter of (In)digestions’ HERE. As part of the festival, the artists also produced online works that are published on La Cocina’s website:

Performance as Text: Neuroplasticity by Céline Mathieu.
I Want to Be Eaten by Celebrities by Toon Fibbe and Laura Wiedijk.
A Musical Piece for Marimba and One Million Colored Squares by Maxim Tyminko.

‘A Matter of (In)digestion’ is supported by the Amsterdam Fonds voor de Kunst, the Prins Bernhard Cultuurfonds and the French Institute in the Netherlands. 

The performance will be streamed: more info to come. 

airWG Amsterdam is pleased to announce the exhibition INDIGO PHASE by Kentaro Yokouchi, Japan 1979. Opening on Friday 18 September 5-7 pm at puntWG exhibition space in Amsterdam.

Yokouchi, the airWG artist in residence since July, will show a selection of works created during this residency period, where the use of indigo and other natural pigments on supports such as paper and silk predominates. His research addresses various historiographical aspects in relation to these natural materials, especially the interaction of Japanese, Indonesian and Dutch cultures concerning its production, use and commercialization.

Kentaro has a special interest in the use of old techniques and historical images which enable a new poetic encounter of cultures, thereby re-establishing bridges and approaches between Eastern and Western art. Also, he reveals traces of links between images of the past, whose silent voices and gestures point to a different configuration of our human condition.

The exhibition will close on Saturday September 26th at puntWG with a special meeting between the public and the artist, in a live connection with curator Mizuho Fujita from Kyoto City University of Arts Art Gallery @KCUA in Japan, who will speak with Kentaro about his recent works exhibited in Japan under the title: SOMETHING FOR EVERYONE, a work that Kentaro made during his stay at airWG Amsterdam.

Photo documentation by Ilya Rabinovich

We count on your presence, next Friday September 18th for the opening and Saturday 26th for the closing and farewell of Kentaro Yokouchi.

Open everyday 1-6pm. Closed on Monday 21/9

Visitor Guidelines - Keeping You Safe!

In adherence to the protocol for cultural spaces due to COVID19 we kindly request you to consider the following before and during your visit;

• Refrain from visiting when you are experiencing (minor) health issues such as a head cold, a runny nose, a cough, a sore throat, a raised temperature or fever and/or shortness of breath
• We will allow a maximum of 5 visitors inside the space at the same time. Individuals, couples, roommates and small families of two or three people.
• You are required to always keep a minimum distance of 1,5 meters from other visitors and staff