DOUBLE DATE
A monthly mutating gesamtkunstwerk
September 2025 - June 2026
DOUBLE DATE was an ongoing, unstable exhibition initiated by me and Max Onink within STUDIO MAX & ELLE; an artist-run space operating outside institutional structures, where our autonomous practices occupied the ground floor and the first floor functioned as a project space. It took place in an anti-squat building awaiting demolition under a 28-day eviction notice, making temporariness and disappearance the core condition rather than a backdrop.

Each month two artists were invited to contribute an object, gesture, sound, or intervention, allowing the exhibition to accumulate as traces remained, while additional guests such as artists, critics, curators, and performers appeared unpredictably, disrupting fixed authorship and any stable direction.
We started this project to stop waiting for permission, funding, or the “right” moment, because that waiting produces dependency and concessions, keeping the work tied to systems that decide when and how it is allowed to exist.

For me, curation is not neutral, it can keep an artwork alive but just as easily bring it to a standstill by stabilizing, clarifying, and making it presentable, allowing the viewer to remain safe and passive. I am interested in refusing that safety, in making work that talks back and forces the viewer into an active position.

Within DOUBLE DATE, the focus was not on producing isolated works or exhibitions but on constructing conditions where something could remain unstable. If those conditions were not given, they were built, not by opposing an existing frame but by creating space for what was missing. This also meant rejecting the idea of the white cube as a neutral container, since it performs neutrality while enforcing control, distance, and legibility. The project became a way to test how far that structure could be stretched or made to fail, even if it could never be fully escaped.

My practice moved toward building spaces that destabilized the viewer’s position. This began already in the first edition, where Edgar Fulton and Robin Finch Pickering built an extra wall that blocked the main entrance and hung a large painting on it. Visitors initially read the space as passive and familiar, until they were told to open the painting and pass through. In that moment their position shifted, they could no longer rely on distance or assumption, and were forced to navigate the space differently; taking the serious as unserious and the other way around.

DOUBLE DATE allowed meaning to shift over time as traces accumulated, the space thickened, resisted clarity, and demanded navigation rather than passive viewing.

This trajectory culminated in DOUBLE DATE 9.0, the final edition before the demolition of the project space. By then the exhibition had spent nine months accumulating works, traces, interventions, conversations and contradictions. Rather than adding another work, Max Onink and I treated the exhibition itself as material.

The space was transformed into a zoo. The exhibition remained in place but was effectively closed, occupied by a ape instead. For five hours I performed inside a cage (exhibition space) while visitors wandered behind the glass as spectators. For the first time, the exhibition itself became secondary. The accumulated works remained present, but functioned more like scenery than autonomous artworks.

Looking back, this feels like a logical endpoint. Throughout DOUBLE DATE I became increasingly interested in the moment a viewer stops looking at a work and realizes they are already inside it. The first edition hid an entrance behind a painting. The final edition turned the exhibition into an enclosure.

What interested me was not the ape itself, but the shift in position. Visitors arrived expecting to look at an exhibition and instead found themselves looking at an animal. At the same time, they became part of the scene they thought they were observing. The exhibition no longer functioned as something to move through, but as a set of conditions assigning roles to everyone present.

After nine months, the exhibition had become too full to simply accept another addition. Like a graveyard, it kept collecting bodies. The final edition did not resolve that problem but exaggerated it. Rather than producing a final artwork, it exposed the exhibition itself as a structure that accumulates, preserves and eventually risks becoming its own monument.

What I take from this feeds directly into the next stage of my practice, where sculptures no longer function as autonomous objects but as props within constructed environments, existing only in relation to the space that holds them.