Enter/Public/Space

exhibition

03.09-03.10.26

 

Enter/Public/Stage

performance festival

03.09-06.09.26

 

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

 

Photos by Pieter Kers.

Bio

PolakVanBekkum is a Dutch artist duo consisting of Esther Polak and Ivar van Bekkum, specializing in digital media, film installation art 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.

 

Saverio Cantoni is a white-passing, disabled, oral Deaf artist based in Berlin. Working through sound, text, and visuals, their practice explores an “aesthetics of access” and non-normative forms of world-making. Their work has been presented at Tate Modern, SAVVY Contemporary, State of Concept, HAU Hebbel am Ufer, and Haus der Kulturen der Welt. They have participated in residencies at Villa Romana, Pivô, and Rupert, and were part of the post-academy programme at Jan van Eyck Academie in 2025.

 

Çağlar Köseoğlu is a poet and educator based in Rotterdam. His work has appeared in nY, De Internet Gids, Social Text, Cabaret Wittgenstein, and Radio Alhara, among others. He is the author of 34 (Stanza, 2015) and Nasleep [Aftermath] (het balanseer, 2020). In 2025, he was poet-in-residence at the Jan van Eyck Academie. He teaches at Erasmus University College and the Sandberg Institute and is currently working on his next collection, onze liefde is terroristisch [our love is terroristic].

 

Giulia Damiani is a performance maker based in Amsterdam. She works through provocative performative situations often starting from a sound investigation, posing urgent questions about violence, vulnerability, language, and a mythical and ecological territory. Her latest work Heart Brake was shown internationally and at Frascati in December 2025. Her new performance project Apology for Fire began with a collaboration with Parasita, Lisbon, and will be further created at STUK. She will publish her first book Nemesis in 2026 with Silver Press, London.

 

Marina Orlova (1987) is an independent dance/theatre maker, tech-dramaturg and AI researcher based in Amsterdam. She received education in sociology in Moscow and in experimental choreography at the Amsterdam Academy of Theatre and Dance. She creates interdisciplinary performances that combine her background in sociology, curiosity for technology, choreographic methodologies and lived knowledge from marginalised communities. In doing so, she mediates between engineering logic and theatrical devices, using technology as both metaphor and mirror to societal issues.

 

Jennifer Tosch is the founder of Black Heritage Tours, which aims to reveal hidden colonial histories within the built environment. She is also the co-founder of Sites of Memory, an organisation that produces history-themed theater.

In addition, Jennifer is also a member of the Mapping Slavery Project Netherlands and has co-authored three books: Amsterdam (2014, 2019), The Netherlands Slavery Heritage Guide (2019), and Dutch New York Histories (2017). She was born in Brooklyn, New York, to Surinamese parents. Her ancestors come from Suriname and West Africa; and, since 1944, the Netherlands.

 

Geo Wyex (b. 1984, New York City) is an artist, musician and performer based in Rotterdam. His ongoing project Muck Studies Dept. is a persona and imaginary city agency that wades through low-lying waters, “looking for stars out of what stinks.” Muck Studies looks at the mucky social formations and aesthetic practices that emerge at the periphery and bottom of Black and queer life, where unlikely alliances emerge through shared need.

His work has been presented at institutions including Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, Dutch National Opera, MoMA PS1, New Museum, ICA Los Angeles, Moderna Museet, and Vleeshal.

 

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.