Belarus is a country whose national identity has been thoroughly destroyed over the past hundreds of years by way of repressions, language reforms, constitutional changes and heavy propaganda. The majority of Belarusians don't know their roots, culture and are ashamed of the Belarusian language, considering it 'peasant-like'. That is one of the reasons why we, as Belarusians, have been asleep as a nation for a long time and are now seeking the process of building and forging a new structure between us as humans, repairing connections between the land and people.

Voices Of Belarus. Chapter Two: Restoring Connections talks about the reparation of liaisons within family, the reconnaissance of ornamental language, the visualisation of the heritage that was never accessible to us, the remembrance of the names of ancestors to restore the way home. Artists invite visitors to acknowledge the exhausting growth of numbers of political prisoners in Belarus. This show is an act of solidarity with the Belarusian citizens who are fighting for their human rights but are ending up imprisoned and labelled as extremists. Voices Of Belarus. Chapter Two: Restoring Connections will guide visitors through the works and their language. It's an open space for conversation, which prompts one to think about abstractions of freedom, reality and dreams of people we might never encounter. 

Due to increasing oppression and severe persecution of any trace of resistance, freedom of speech and/or artistic expression in Belarus, we feel the urge to make multiple voices be heard and noticed despite the informational, political and territorial isolation of their origin. As a group of two expats and one resident of Belarus, we aim to raise the visibility of cultural cleansing by offering what we still have and are able to maintain by emerging and reinforcing connections from the outside and inside of our Motherland. 

Voices of Belarus. Chapter Two: Restoring Connections presents a new series of The Postcards Of Solidarity, and individual works: Long Way Home. Part  2, 2021 - the audio-visual installation by Masha Maroz; 10 Years Of Not Being Home - the photo zine and prints by Sasha Kulak; I Cry, I Cannot See - the sculptural illustration and the eponymous poem by Dasha Golova.

The Postcards of Solidarity, 2021 

(second edition - 555 pieces)

An ongoing project of Dasha Golova based on precious findings of textiles and tapestry from the ethnographic archive Past Perfect, this edition is realised in collaboration with Masha Maroz and Sasha Kulak. We kindly invite you to stand in solidarity with political prisoners in Belarus. Each of 555 cards is dedicated to each different person. These postcards are puzzles/fragments of a wider message, an ornamental code of Belarusian tapestry and embroidery, interlacing with the image behind it. This code is the key to our identity. The fragmentation of the print serves as a protection from censorship. Each of the postcards contains the information of the recipient such as the name and address of the prison, a stamp and our key message, an ornamental watchword. Everything is ready for you to activate this — not necessarily verbal — communication by choosing one of the postcards and dropping it into the postbox. By doing so you are delivering hope, a gesture of awareness, acknowledgement and support.   

The artists 

Sasha Kulak: a filmmaker, whom work spans a variety of visual projects ranging from documentary to fashion and music videos to photography and curation.

Masha Maroz: multidisciplinary artist and ethnographer from Minsk working on topics of collective memory trough personal, "belarusian context”, national identity.

Dasha Golova: artist and tailor, devoted to reflection on social fabric, its ruptures and reparations. Founder of biannual event Textile Initiative, based in Amsterdam.  

This event is the last episode of the project Wanting to but Not and will present:

☞ A booklet designed by Ronja Andersen. This booklet works as a small catalogue of our exhibition at puntWG and it includes new images and the original texts from the art works of Giovanni Giaretta, Helena Grande and Faysal Mroueh. 

☞ A new episode of feelsgalore together with poet and artist Daniel Vorthuys. Hanging out during the performance we did last February created a space for sharing fairy-tales and other fantasy constructs through sound. We have worked on a poetic audiowork titled feelsgalore.radio where we compiled our voices telling old and new stories, accompanied by music and sound. 

☞ feelsgalore.radio will be available at puntWG during Saturday 10 July, just book a time slot if you’d like to listen: LINK.

Daily from12:00 -» 20:00.

There is no opening per se, everyday there will be recording/cutting sessions open to the public. On the last day there will be a finissage with a live performance using the recorded materials. The time of the performance is flexible.

Suggested Cuts: is a small exercise in live record cutting as a performance tool.

The project is based on exploring the possibilities of the vinyl recorder lathe, also known as a dubplate cutter. This machine essentially works like a normal record player, but in reverse: it uses a diamond stylus to cut the vinyl in real-time to engrave the vibrations produced by the incoming sound signal.

For Suggested Cuts:, Avelãs invited a number of artists and musicians to each create a small edition of unique versions of the same piece/composition – if there are 10 copies, it will be performed 10 different times, and each dubplate will be unique.

In collaboration with André Avelãs, the invited artists/musicians are encouraged to explore the limitations and possibilities of the medium of vinyl records – etching, shaping, making picture discs, exploring locked, inverted and parallel grooves, using materials like X-rays or old CDs, making unplayable record-objects, drilling multiple centre holes, and so on...

Visitors are welcome to attend the recording/cutting sessions, and to listen to the records cut on the days before on listening stations in the space.

Finissage 30 May 14-18 Hrs 
Visits by Appointment
Thur-Sun / 14-18 Hrs

In 2019, Good Neighbour (GN) proposed an exhibition that could be seen as a container for words, similar to a book. To make art as words, this was the invitation to ten artists and one writer to participate in Sufferin’ Succotash. Back then, different works were drafted, organized, selected and written. Due to the pandemic, the show was postponed and all the plans were delayed. Throughout 2020, this interruption opened time and space for new meanings and reconsideration. In its 2021 version, the works embraced slight adjustments and the exhibition became SUSU, a repetition of the original show, but including a few differences. 

The title Sufferin’ Succotash was originally taken from Ron Padgett & Joe Brainard’s homonymous publication made in 1971. It referred to a trademark expression said back then by Silvester the cat, the Looney Tunes’ cartoon. 

“Because these cartoon characters were ubiquitous in the childhood of most North Americans between, say, 1940 and 1995, a lot of people have only ever heard this phrase said by them, never by an actual human in the same room they are in.” According to users of the question-and-answer website Quora: “it was an interjection to express dismay, frustration, distress or surprise. Anyhow, the literal meaning of succotash is a vegetable dish with corn and beans, sometimes also with tomato, peppers, or onion. The phrase sufferin’ succotash may therefore have an intrinsic meaning beyond its usefulness as a minced oath: aw, crap, we're eating this again?”

To visit the show please reserve a spot through this link. 

Good Neighbour (GN) is a research platform based in Amsterdam since 2017, run by artist Martin La Roche, designer Dongyoung Lee and researcher Valeria Marchesini. GN defines itself primarily as a community of readers who share a communal interest for books seen as performative tools. GN doesn’t seek to build a library, it makes time for appreciating existing ones.

This exhibition is made possible with the kind support of the Amsterdams Fonds voor de Kunst and Mondriaan Fonds.

To see the whole SUSU’s documentation go to this Art Viewer feature.

  

Concept: Koen Bartijn

Performers: Doke Pauwels, Elisa Zuppini, Federica Dalla Pozza

Choreography: Elisa Zuppini 

In Bare Time three performers inhabit the space of Punt WG for a day. The daily activities of practising, dancing, and resting are performed within the space. Looped, these activities succumb to a bare choreographed pattern in which nothing new seems to enter. At the same time, the shared space in which they’re performed provides the potential for micro-events to influence the flow, creating raptures in the routines and emancipating them. While their times and activities are partitioned, there is a constant search for a common time

On May 1st and 2nd, we open the doors of the exhibition space in which you can witness the dancers in the loop of their common practice. 

This performance is part of Antidote an international network of solidarity, collaboration and collectivity between dancers, artists, thinkers and other creatives.

Images: Julia Mira https://juliamira.net/

Read Radna Rumping's text accompanying the show here.

There’s a hypothesis that the appendixes of Homo habilis and our earlier ancestors could emit and receive radiation, allowing for a form of remote feeling over long distances, something that became vestigial as the voice gained primacy. If a telephone ‘speaks with its ears and hears with its mouth’, as the riddle suggests, the appendix was able to talk without either orifice, transmitting and receiving directly through the skin's pores. Stress can cause acid reflux to abrade and mute the vocal cords, and as the throat quietens, the appendix sings along to other voices. 

Appendix Songs is an exhibition touching on friendly abjection and sensing at a distance, with works by Mónica Mays, Susan Ploetz, Jean-Francois Peschot and Tom K Kemp, with a text by Radna Rumping. 

Live Programme 

Susan Ploetz - ‘PSY-SOMA-TEK’ - LARP
8th-25th April
One-to-One Sessions: Bookable between the 10th and 25th April
Group Sessions - 13th, 16th and 21st April
Group sessions conducted as 3 hour larp (live action role play)
Online group session April 25th
For more info and to sign up visit: https://susanploetz.com/PSY-SOMA-TEK

Through iterative role plays and one-on-one appointments participants will explore a variety of embodied extra-sensory techniques inside the fictional framing of a speculative institution called PSY-SOMA-TEK. Founded by a mysterious figure in a time of crisis, the institute seeks to create sustainable psy-somatic technologies to find missing people, see into the past and future, and communicate and connect across distances, decentralize knowledge and extend powers to those in need when the technocratic-suprastructures of the old order have started to fall apart.

Tom K Kemp - ‘After the Maestro’ participatory RPG session - ONLINE.
Saturday 17th and Sunday 18th April @ 3pm
5 players per session - duration ~3hrs.
Book an appointment by writing you name in this document
Or email tomkkemp@gmail.com.

After the Maestro is a tabletop roleplaying game set within an anthropomorphised anatomical city akin to those seen in animations like Once Upon a Time... Life, Osmosis Jones and Cells at Work!. Players take on the role of cellular and microbial workers during the aftermath of a successful labour emancipation within the inner body. Through ludic storytelling and speculative worldbuilding, each iteration of the game generates a narrative with its own body-politic metaphors, describing and anthropomorphising different anatomical systems and devising new structures of organisation and interdependence in the sudden absence of established biological hierarchies.

Artist Bios

Mónica Mays’ (ES/NL) practice considers materials and objects through their production and reproduction - following the contexts they come from, through the symbolic meanings they acquire, to the economies they circulate in. Informed by fabulations of the home, her installations work with the vernacular stories and tacit knowledges of the objects she deploys, where craft, lore and agencies meet.

Susan Ploetz (US/DE) is an artist-researcher working with somatics, theory, writing, experience design and real-life simulations in different speculative configurations. Her work deals with the overlapping spaces of soma and technos; she uses imagination, the senses, bodymind, magical materiality and protocol to induce emancipatory emotive dissonances and the expansion of perceptions and ontologies.

Jean-Francois Peschot (FR/NL) revises the function of contemporary imaging technologies, forcing mutations in the translation and standardisation of information into human modes of comprehension. Through sculpture and video he explores mechanisms at work in the image economy, using misappropriated consumer devices to contaminate common scientific narratives and the production of semiotics.

The films and installations of Tom K Kemp (UK/NL) use RPG design, improvised filmmaking and animation to parse the eerie consequences of global bureaucratic and financial systems on intimate and immediate human relations. His works generate semi-autonomous Weird fictions, where gamification and collaborative storytelling are combined into a deviated method of complexity modelling.

Given the current situation, the artists will work in the space and build up the exhibition as planned but open public visits will only be announced in April if the current corona measures change. Follow the exhibition through our Instagram account.

Works and exhibition supported by Mondriaan Fonds, Amsterdam Fonds voor de Kunst, Bilbao Arte Foundation and the Stimuleringsfonds.

Photo documentation by the exhibitors

Given the current situation, the artists will work in the space and build up the exhibition as planned but the opening and public visits will only be announced after 9 February if the current corona measures change. You can follow the exhibition through our Instagram account and an online event will take place on 28 February. The space is currently closed to the public.

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.

Reading Performance Event

feelsgalore.tv is a live reading performance part of the project Wanting to but Not. We’ll share the link to the event on Facebook and Instagram.

channel 1. Helena Grande reading from Wanting to bu Not, accompanying music by Daniel Vorthuys, Faysal Mroueh and Giovanni Giaretta. She's written a science fiction story where planthumans (half humans, half plants) cannot live freely because they have become addicted to a terrans’ substance that induces human emotions and desires in them. 

This feeling is difficult to describe. 

It is a rush of energy that gently takes control of your life. 

I want to help 

                                        work 

                                                 sex 

                                                        stop

    I want to 

      but I also don’t want to.

channel 2. Daniel Vorthuys is going to play songs and poems featuring famous characters from Ancient mythology, sometimes Greek, or older Assyrian figures. Penelope waiting for her husband’s return together with 100 suitors, let’s stop and consider the fantasies such a situation unleashed upon the famous Greek ‘cuckquean’ – the wife of Odysseus the adventurous [raise eyebrows] husband. 

1. Attis, high priest of the Dindymis
2. Jason and his Argonauts
3. Achilles and Thetis
4. Penelope, the cuckquaen
5. Poseidon.

Accompanied by Faysal Mroueh and Giovanni Giaretta.

Bios

Giovanni Giaretta is a visual artist living in Amsterdam who works with video, installation, photography and a few writings. His work has recently been featured at IFFR (Rotterdam, NL) MAMbo (Bologna, IT); Tegenboschvanvreden (Amsterdam, NL); He is represented by Galleria Tiziana Di Caro.

Helena Grande is a writer and curator based in Amsterdam. She is the author of the flash fiction collection Speech Choke (2020). Her stories have appeared in Fictional Journal and the anthology book DW Cities Amsterdam and her essays in A*Desk, nY and Research Catalogue.

Faysal Mroueh is a visual artist living in Rotterdam who works with installation, digital media and sound. His work has recently been shown at Thkio Ppalies in Nicosia, Arti et Amicitiae in Amsterdam and AVL Mundo in Rotterdam.

Daniel Vorthuys is a poet based in Amsterdam. His work explores the heritage of the western classical tradition through its stories of metamorphosis, transforming this tradition into a mythology of alien and unstable subject-hood. His writing is geared towards performance and video introducing elements of music and costume. His work was most recently presented at Currents #8 in Marres, Maastricht. 

Photo documentation by Ilya Rabinovich.