Enter/Public/Space

Exhibition: 3 September – 3 October 2026

 

Enter/Public/Stage

Performance Festival: 3 – 6 September 2026

 

Which bodies are allowed to move freely and unhindered through the city? How can groups of people change cities through organisation, solidarity and movement? During a performance festival and exhibition in ROZENSTRAAT, a diverse group of artists will explore these questions and many more besides through videos, readings, performances, tours and workshops.

 

The 2002 artwork AmsterdamREALTIME by Esther Polak, Jeroen Kee and Waag Futurelab will serve as the starting point for the Enter/Public/Space exhibition and the Enter/Public/Stage performance festival. For this piece, participants ‘drew’ an interactive map of Amsterdam using early GPS systems. Created by people’s movement through the city, this map becomes a residue of an embodied performance, revealing how users appropriate and rewrite the city from within. The festival and exhibition engage in critical dialogue with AmsterdamREALTIME and consider the presence of different bodies in public spaces. It aims to acknowledge the shifting nature of their presence and the norms of their acceptance in different contexts by tracing their choreography of power and vulnerability.

 

Enter/Public/Space and Enter/Public/Stage investigate the performativity of the body, presence in public spaces, and the political dimensions of urban design and technology. Bodies in public spaces are read, judged, and regulated through and ‘oriented’ around unevenly distributed infrastructural conditions. Some movements feel natural, but others encounter resistance, friction, or exclusion. The program pays special attention to mobility and surveillance. At a time when freedom of movement, visibility, and control are becoming increasingly unequal, the festival offers an artistic platform for the critical, sensory, and public exploration of these urgent issues.

 

The participating artists use public space as both stage and subject for the development of artistic, technological, and socio-political projects. The outdoor space becomes a realm for play, research, and provocation, in which existing boundaries (physical, legal, technological) are tested and questioned.

 

Curated by

Sanneke Huisman and belit sağ

 

Exhibition

Noor Abed, Cyan Bae, Mona Hatoum, Jan Robert Leegte, Mapping Solidarity for Palestine, Esther Polak, Pegah Tabassinejad

 

Performance festival

Black Heritage Tours, Çağlar Köseoğlu and Saverio Cantoni, Giulia Damiani, Mapping Solidarity for Palestine, Marina Orlova, PolakVanBekkum, Geo Wyex

 

Cover image: Pegah Tabassinejad, Entropic Fields of Displacement, 2024, video still.

Installation photo’s by Pieter Kers.

Bio

Noor Abed (b. 1988, Jerusalem) is an interdisciplinary artist and filmmaker. Her practice explores choreography and the imagined relationships between individuals, creating situations in which social possibilities are both rehearsed and enacted. She studied at the Whitney Independent Study Program in New York and the Home Workspace Program at Ashkal Alwan in Beirut, and holds a BA from the International Academy of Art Palestine and an MFA from CalArts. She has been a fellow at documenta (13) and a resident at Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris and Raw Material Company in Dakar. In 2020, she co-founded the School of Intrusions, an educational platform in Ramallah, together with Lara Khaldi.

 

Cyan Bae (b. 1993, Korea) is a visual artist, filmmaker, researcher, and film producer based in Rotterdam, the Netherlands. Their work often explores bodily and emotional experiences in relation to socio-technical systems through experimental filmmaking, graphics, and writing. Cyan’s ongoing doctoral research investigates the politics of algorithmic lie detection and emotion recognition technologies, employing reenactment and filmmaking as research methods. Their film Welcome to Set (2026) received the Tënk Opening Scenes Award at Visions du Réel. Dear Chaemin (2020) won the Grand Prize at the Seoul International Women’s Film Festival and the National Award at Leiden Shorts.

 

Mona Hatoum (b. 1952, Beirut) was born into a Palestinian family and has lived and worked in London since 1975. Her poetic and political work spans installation, sculpture, video, photography and works on paper. She began in the 1980s with video and performance work centred on the body, and since the early 1990s has created large-scale installations that provoke conflicting feelings of desire and revulsion, fear and fascination. She transforms everyday objects into works that feel unfamiliar, or even threatening. Her work has been exhibited internationally, including at Tate Modern, Centre Pompidou, Kunsthaus Zürich and Fondazione Prada, and she has received honours including the Praemium Imperiale (2019) and the Joan Miró Prize (2011).

 

Jan Robert Leegte is one of the first Dutch artists to work on and for the Internet since the 1990s. In 2002, he shifted his focus to implementing digital materials in the context of the physical gallery space, aiming to bridge the online art world with the gallery art world, making prints, sculpture, installations, drawings, and projections, connecting to historical movements like land art, minimalism, performance art, and conceptualism. His work has been exhibited internationally at Whitechapel Gallery, Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, Van Gogh Museum , ZKM , Centre Pompidou, Museum Ludwig. He is currently represented by Upstream Gallery (Amsterdam), Office Impart (Berlin), Tender (USA).

 

Mapping Solidarity for Palestine is a collaborative artistic and activist working group based in Amsterdam. Composed of art workers, researchers, and community organisers, the group operates horizontally through workshops, collective decision-making, and working groups focused on research, mapping, and direct action.

The group gathers the community to reflect on pro-Palestine actions and cultural boycotts, using mapping as both a research method and a political tool. Sessions have taken place at W139, GROND, BAK Basecamp, and Pakhuis de Zwijger, with support from Platform BK.

For this presentation, the wider group of 16 is represented by Saja Amro, Elektra Tatalia-Aloupi, Alina Lupu and Samuel Salminen.

 

Esther Polak forms the Dutch artist duo PolakVanBekkum together with Ivar van Bekkum, working across digital media, film installation and drawing. Rooted in the rich history of traditional Dutch realistic landscape depiction, they embrace modern technologies like GPS data collection and Google Earth and classical drawing techniques to map out the choreographies of daily mobility. Their interactive, experimental projects often explore the poetics of movement through time and space, tracking the journeys of humans, animals, and objects. Based alternately in Amsterdam and rural Gelderland, the duo has exhibited globally, and their films have been screened at Dutch and international film festivals.

 

Pegah Tabassinejad is an interdisciplinary artist and educator. Her new media practice centres on digital and live performance, film and video installation. She examines how surveillance and digital culture shape identity, and how virtual and physical presence and absence affect the way marginalised and female bodies move through public and private space. She holds an MFA from Simon Fraser University and a BA in stage direction from Tehran University of Art. Her work has been shown at venues including Volksbühne Berlin and the Push Festival in Vancouver. With the video installation Entropic Fields of Displacement, she won the 2024 IDFA DocLab Award for Digital Storytelling.