EXPO NOORD
Duo show with Max Onink, Skatepark NOORD, Amsterdam, November 2024
Duo show with Max Onink, Skatepark NOORD, Amsterdam, November 2024
At EXPO NOORD, a duo exhibition with Max Onink at Skatepark Noord, I presented a series of sculptures and paintings within an environment shared with concerts and a skate competition. Different subcultures collided, not as a curated theme but as an existing condition we chose to work within.
The initial promotional text leaned into the language of commercial seduction, borrowing from the tone of brands that market intensity and rebellion back to a young audience. It framed the exhibition as something immediate, physical, and unstable. Not a quiet gallery setting, but a space of friction, adrenaline, concrete, impact:
“Broken Boards as Altars, Moshpits as Habitats. . .
Forget the quiet gallery stroll!
This is adrenaline and concrete.
Grit under your shoes. Noise in your chest.
A space where impact is the medium and chaos sets the rhythm.
We drove art straight into the raw pulse of a skate park, where falling is expected and getting back up is the only rule.
You don’t just look, you move: You dodge, stumble, push through.
Maybe you leave with bruises, maybe with something else. . .
No velvet ropes. No distance. No safe position.
Here, spectators don’t exist. You’re in it. Part of the collision, part of the spill, part of the work.
Show up! Or miss it. . .”
Looking back, that language wasn’t just stylistic. It revealed an interest in how attention is captured, how bodies are drawn in, and how experience is pre-scripted even before arrival. By mimicking that voice, I was also testing it, seeing how far it could be pushed before it collapses into something excessive or empty.
The exhibition itself resisted the conditions of the white cube. Works were not isolated or protected but embedded in an active environment where movement, risk, and interruption were constant. Visitors didn’t occupy a stable viewing position; they had to navigate, adjust, sometimes even withdraw. The work was not something to stand in front of, but something you encountered while something else was happening.
This was the first time Max and I organized an exhibition entirely outside established platforms. Without institutional framing or spatial neutrality, we had to construct the conditions ourselves, deciding how and where the work could exist, and under what pressures.
What became clear is that once you remove the safety mechanisms of the exhibition space, the role of the viewer shifts. They are no longer a detached observer, but also not fully in control. There is a thin line between immersion and loss of orientation. That tension, between attraction and discomfort, participation and risk, continues to inform my practice.
The question remains: how much instability can a work hold before it stops being legible, and what kind of viewer does that produce?
This was the first time Max and I organized an exhibition entirely outside established platforms. Without institutional framing or spatial neutrality, we had to construct the conditions ourselves, deciding how and where the work could exist, and under what pressures.
What became clear is that once you remove the safety mechanisms of the exhibition space, the role of the viewer shifts. They are no longer a detached observer, but also not fully in control. There is a thin line between immersion and loss of orientation. That tension, between attraction and discomfort, participation and risk, continues to inform my practice.
The question remains: how much instability can a work hold before it stops being legible, and what kind of viewer does that produce?