The exhibition is open each day 2-7pm.

Part of the airWG series

A man stops. Closes his eyes. He covers his ears with the index fingers of both hands. He tilts his head upwards and makes a sharp, muffled noise. 

His body contracts at the same time, raising his right foot. The gesture looks like the beginning of a ritual but does not continue. It lasts six seconds. The spasm goes through his brain, his shoulders, his chest, the muscles of his arms and forearms, his stomach, his pelvis, his thighs and his calves. He shows no communication and continues his way.
(Pau Masclans, 2024)

Pau Masclans presents scenarios where reality and abstraction friction and make space vibrate. His work is based on the manipulation of the physical through twists and turns that lead to unstable results rubbing with everyday life. 

During his residency at airWG, September - December 2024, the Barcelona-born artist will present at puntWG the open corpus of work KRAMP EN KRIMP (2024). 

Generously supported by Fundació R. Amigó Cuyàs / BBAA, Universitat de Barcelona.

Photography by Ilya Rabinovic

Part of the puntWG Open Call Series

A color, a mineral, and a myth - Kobold on the Unemployment Line; an exhibition in three  installments is a collaboration between artists Helena Sanders (US/NL) and Michael Petri (Vienna, AT) opening August 17th until September 8th. The exhibition imagines the limits, transformations and excavations of materials, labor, language and landscape through the fever-dreams of a time traveling Kobold. This folkloric figure dating back to the 15th century is a creature reported to live  in coal and silver mines, mimicking the miners in dress and behaviour, and causing havoc and  disruption to their routines and efforts to extract. Both the mineral and the color blue Cobalt, take their name directly from this being who reluctantly mediates the worlds of the mineral and human intelligences.  

Helena and Michael have created new works including a lighting scenography, matte paintings,  audio installations, ceramic and sculptural work. 

From the Carboniferous Era to a speculative future - as Scale Trees become coal seams become  synthetic dyes - the Kobold finds itself unemployed, buying things on layaway, and we’re left making due without.  

Through the exhibition, the artists will host three events (installments); an opening event, a guest artist presentation, and closing event - during each, the artists will add or amend works within the exhibition.  

August 17 : Installment 1
Exhibition opening with a short introduction and performance moment.

August 31 : Installment 2
Artist talk/workshop with guest artist Annika Kappner. 

Liquid Dreams: Shared stories 

Together we will journey through the shared history of human and mineral intelligence. A  multidimensional and multi sensorial adventure of co-creative evolution from supernovas  to quantum computing, via dating apps and health trackers. 

September 7 : Installment 3
Closing event -with an artist talk / presentation moment. 

Generously supported by AFK.
With technical support and contribution from: Martin Poisel, Michael Fux, Katrina Niebergal, Nicole Martens, Anami Schrijvers, Marcus Zilz, Charlott Markus, and Ticho Brouwers.

Photography by Ilya Rabinovic

Part of the atelierWG series

As we’ve dared to call the monkeys in the Zoo by Irish names,
Erin’s sons, in wrath, declare us snobs and flunkies; 
And demand that we withdraw them – nor should we ignore their claims---
For it’s really very hard --- Upon the monkeys.

The exhibition Killing the Goose That Laid the Golden Egg draws on recent Irish history and fuses these events with artificial intelligence (AI), to reflect on the creation of alternative, speculative (historical) narratives.

At the core of the exhibition are several old cartoon publications from the 19th and 20th centuries, in which the Irish were depicted as apes; to dehumanize and morally suppress them, or used as propaganda in the struggle for Ireland's independence. 

Mockingly embracing this painful part of history, Killing the Goose That Laid the Golden Egg showcases paintings, prints and a video installation that builds on this theme and breaks with, or perhaps at times embraces, existing stereotypes.  

In line with the latter, we naturally expect you to come for a drink.

We look forward to seeing you at the opening on Thursday, August 1st 2024, from 5 PM to 9 PM. 

(During the exhibition, puntWG will be open on Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays and by appointment)

Part of the atelierWG series

In his film KALI WAAL and the accompanying spatial installation, Jasper Coppes shares the outcome of a long term collaboration around a controversial sand quarry lake in the Netherlands.

A group of foreign researchers visits a site of ecological controversy and learns of the strange events that are happening to the lake and its human and non-human inhabitants. Can the natural reserve be healed with toxic mud as industries claim?

In the short film KALI WAAL, landscape design is both poison and remedy. A nature reserve in the Netherlands is the setting for an ecological controversy. Decades of industrial sand extraction created lakes so deep that no light can reach the bottom. The lakes have seemingly become lifeless pools of water. Industries recently started to dump contaminated mud in these lakes, claiming that such undeepening will increase the biodiversity. A group of young researchers gradually discovers that this landscape is neither an innocent rewilding project, nor an ecological dead-end. As resilient forms of life take center stage a new ecology of plants, alga, animals, and machines increasingly takes over the film.

Fiction as Resistance: Jasper Coppes in conversation with Mira Sys

On Saturday 27 July at 17:00 exhibiting artist Jasper Coppes opens the doors of puntWG for a public talk about the research behind his film. He will have a conversation with journalist and writer Mira Sys, whose research into contaminated lakes was the key inspiration for KALI WAAL. Jasper and Mira invite you to join the conversation and explore the ways in which fiction and environmental justice might go hand in hand.

Opening Times:
Weekdays: RSVP at ldubourjal@hotmail.fr 
Weekends: 12:00 - 18:00 

Part of the puntWG Open Call Series

The Sound of Fabrics is a group exhibition that finds its meeting point in the medium of textiles. By diverting or rehabilitating artisanal practices, each artist gives shape to personal, historical or speculative narratives that materialize and take shape in the act of informing fabric.

Embroidery, weaving, knitting and painting all become strategies for anchoring words in the textile material, which resembles a writing space where different stories can be read. These techniques, borrowed from popular traditions, represent a means of transmission that is not only linked to the know-how inherent in them, but also to the discursive potential they carry within them.

Photography by Ilya Rabinovich

Exhibition opening hours: Tues-Fri 13:00-19:00 / Sat-Sun 14:00-18:00  
Exhibition walk-through with the artist: Sunday 16 June, 16:00

Part of the airWG Series

The Unseen Eyebeam Crossed is a new body of site-responsive sculptural works by Irish artist Marie Farrington, marking her first solo exhibition in the Netherlands. Informed by histories and material residues around the WG building, the works take the studio and gallery space as points of departure to explore architecture as a conduit for memory, an orientation of relationships, and a ritual landscape of reciprocity and care. 

A broad range of materials converge in works that contain bi-products from each other’s production. Formations in glass, soapstone, talc, clay, brass, candlewick and jute reflect on the space as both an  archive and stage. Found windowpanes originating from the surrounding residential streets become  contingent frames that enter into exchange with the architecture, holding ghostly silhouettes of  exhibition objects. Leakages, gaps, breakages and displacements reveal the porous borders of these arrangements, creating a set of testing grounds that seem both diagrammatic and ephemeral. 

The resulting works evoke a spectral presence through unfixed or provisional elements centred around  transparency, opacity and fragmentation. The installations perform a subtle mapping of the gallery’s X and Y axes, plotting the body and it’s material encounters within pictorial and spatial planes. What  emerges is a meditation on the act of looking, manifested through assemblages that reflect on the  conditions of their own visibility.  

Marie Farrington (b. 1990) is an Irish visual artist and writer. Her practice reflects on the act of making  through geological and archaeological lenses. Using casting, carving and other sculptural processes, she engages with memory through situated encounters with landscape and architecture. Her work  makes formal reference to field sampling, built heritage and histories of display. Marie is a Project  Studio awardee at Temple Bar Gallery+Studios, Dublin (2024-25). She is supported by The Arts Council of Ireland.  

With special thanks to Wilma Kuijvenhoven, Els van der Graaf, Hugo Palmer, Rob ter Haar, Miku Sato, and all at MAKE Eindhoven glass department, especially Lorena Miguel, Magdalena Köb and Noa Zandee. 

Photography by Ilya Rabinovic

Part of the puntWG Open Call Series

‘double double’ is an exhibition and LARP (Live Action Role Play) by Zuza Banasińska and Myrto Vratsanou. The artists explore the figure of the double as a device towards non-hierarchical kinship, through a reflection on mirroring, shadowing, occupying negative space and other modes of proliferating the self.  

Doubling is treated as a methodology for story-telling and speculation, reflecting and refracting  unstable identities. Mirroring becomes a way to process, relate, collaborate and become hybrid.  Split pebbles and neolithic carvings lead to superimposition, glitches and other ghosts of the  cinematic apparatus. The artists appropriate the method of traceology to speculate around  corrosions, fissures and wounds, generating doubles as a filling compound for canonical  knowledge gaps. Similar to the original yet other, these copies interrupt linearity and unearth  ghostly qualities. At puntWG, Banasińska and Vratsanou construct a stage for this exploration,  focusing on the story-telling potential of interpreting traces, early cinema’s doppelgangers and  other projections, in the form of a film and a series of objects and drawings.  

This “stage” will be activated through 2 participatory LARP sessions, revolving around a film  production dealing with corrupted footage and a missing protagonist. Participants will be invited  to embody film-makers or film-characters, to reflect on what lies in the negative space of the missing hero, and what new tropes of kinship can be discovered there.  

The Live Action Role Play will be discussion-based and will be shaped by the participants  themselves. It is structured as a playful, immersive way to approach theoretical and conceptual  thought. No previous LARP background is required. If you’d like to participate, please write an  email to doubledoubledouble22@protonmail.com including your name and which of the two dates you prefer. After that you will receive your character card. In the meantime, we are happy to answer any questions.

Zuza Banasińska (they/them) is an artist and filmmaker from Warsaw, based in Amsterdam. In  their practice, they are interested in the reproduction of images and how these enable the  reproduction of systems, subjects and bodies. They approach this through a speculative  (re)performance of archives within essay films and installations. They studied at the Academy of  Fine Arts in Cracow and Sandberg Instituut, as well as the Universität der Künste in Berlin. Their  works have been shown in spaces such as the U-Jazdowski CCA in Warsaw and Dům Umění  Mesta Brna, among others. Their recent film premiered at International Film Festival Rotterdam  2024 and the 74th Berlinale, where it received the Teddy Award for best short film.  

Myrto Vratsanou (she/her) is a visual artist based in Copenhagen and Athens. Her practice  revolves around the haunted, uncanny aspects of digital and material spaces. Working in drawing  and sculpture, she explores material histories, fictions, and traditions. Vratsanou studied at the  Athens School of Fine Arts, the Sandberg Instituut, as well as the Academy of Media Arts Cologne (KHM). Her work has been shown in spaces such as: Weltkunszimmer Dusseldorf, Temporary  Gallery Cologne, Neverneverland and the Eye film museum in Amsterdam, Chisenhale Gallery  London, One Minute Space and a.antonopoulou. art gallery in Athens.

Myrto Vratsanou’s participation is supported by Goethe Institute and the European Union through the program Culture Moves Europe.

Exhibition Open: 5.06.24 - 9.06.24 from 14.00 until 18.00
Opening Event: Saturday 8 June from 17.00 until 20.00. At 18:00 there will be an artists' talk moderated by Anna Bitkina.

Part of the atelierWG Series

In this exhibition three artists will show different approaches to depicting historical narratives.

National Museums
In his ongoing project Revisiting Museutopia, artist Ilya Rabinovich examines the role of national museums in shaping identity narratives. As a native of Moldova raised in Israel, Rabinovich's installation features photographs of national museums from both countries, blending their unique features to expose the shared mechanisms they employ. The installation offers a sensory experience that invites viewers to reflect on how these cultural institutions influence our understanding of history and belonging.

Urban landscape
The paintings of Tatyana Yassievich often depict Russian cities and landscapes which bear the imprint of history in the form of statues, churches and military objects, but also more mundane traces of residents and builders. Her work reveals the many faces of the city from a human perspective.

Art
Arnout Killian's paintings of tapestries are based on pictures found in handcraft books for amateurs from the seventies. He is interested in how icons of modern art leak into the visual language of popular culture and how meaning is altered when a picture travels through different media. 

Photography by Ilya Rabinovic