Part of the puntWG Open Call Series

Lived experience, seeping bodily fluids, nosey neighbours, “nuisance tourism”, urban redevelopment schemes, commercialised culture, and back-handed liberalism; TOLERANCE is a group exhibition by Pennie Key, Brianna Leatherbury, and Tild Greene. The show presents the complexities and contradictions between private and public space in Amsterdam, taking De Wallen and the WG-Terrain as its sites of study.

The self-proclaimed “tolerance” of Amsterdam specifically is in question. Especially as the city is now reconsidering its economic future, “the kinds of tourists” it would like to have visit, and, most shockingly, the future of legal sex work, we wanted to bring together our specific experiences and interests in the structural make up of Amsterdam that also comprise our individual practices. Together we react on private and public exchange, the city’s own ecologies of visibility, voyeurism, pomp, and surveillance.

Altogether, TOLERANCE presents different frictions of bodies and materials that make up and challenge the physical space of the community, anchored directly in our city. By working with the structures that direct our behaviours in Amsterdam, each of our work is a means of questioning the social norms assumed by these structures.

Closing event: Saturday 19 May at 19:00 (with the show open from 13:00)
Mercy (co-founder of HXSSY: Queer SW Arts & Culture, and sex worker of 5 years, currently living and working in De Wallen) will join to discuss life and work in the Red Light District, the planned displacement of the windows and the New Erotic Centre.