DOUBLE DATE
A monthly mutating gesamtkunstwerk
(since September 2025 - on show, until demolition)
DOUBLE DATE is 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 occupy the ground floor and the first floor functions as a project space. It takes 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 are invited to contribute an object, gesture, sound, or intervention, allowing the exhibition to accumulate as traces remain, while additional guests such as artists, critics, curators, and performers appear 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 is not on producing isolated works or exhibitions but on constructing conditions where something can remain unstable. If those conditions are not given, they are built, not by opposing an existing frame but by creating space for what is missing. This also means rejecting the idea of the white cube as a neutral container, since it performs neutrality while enforcing control, distance, and legibility. The project becomes a way to test how far that structure can be stretched, distorted, or made to fail, even if it can never be fully escaped.

My practice moves toward building spaces that destabilize the viewer’s position, not something to look at but something to be inside of. This begins 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 are told to open the painting and pass through. In that moment their position shifts, they can no longer rely on distance or assumption, and are forced to navigate the space differently, taking the serious as unserious and the other way around.

DOUBLE DATE allows meaning to shift over time as traces accumulate, the space thickens, resists clarity, and demands navigation rather than passive viewing. 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.