FRIDAY AT MELLY

Looking for something to do this Friday?

Visit Kunstinstituut Melly this Friday evening and explore all current exhibitions for free from 6:00 to 9:00 PM.

This is also the final day to visit TOOLSHED #2: The Imaginary Stage: Act III — Dear Puppet, sorry to burden you with existence. PS. Please speak for me. by Andrea Celeste La Forgia and Kerem Akar.

Exhibitions

Explore four exhibitions across the building:

TOOLSHED #2: The Imaginary Stage: Act III — Dear Puppet, sorry to burden you with existence. PS. Please speak for me.

Act III of The Imaginary Stage is a collaborative project by Andrea Celeste La Forgia and Kerem Akar, developed within the TOOLSHED residency at Kunstinstituut Melly. The project understands The Imaginary Stage as the capacity to imagine otherwise: not as fantasy or escape, but as a shared social practice through which new characters, relationships, ideas, and possibilities can be rehearsed collectively through play and experimentation. Over the course of several months, the artists worked with participants from neighbourhood centres across Rotterdam to explore creativity in relation to labour, migration, social class, collective learning, and making. Through workshops, participants created puppets and developed their characters intuitively through conversation, improvisation, storytelling, and theatre exercises. The puppets became agents of imagination and collective inquiry, redistributing voice and agency while creating space for participants to explore personal and collective stories, memories, desires, and impossible ideas through the voice of another.

Prisoners of Love: Until the Sun of Freedom

Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme compose a poetics of resistance, layering songs, testimonies, and sonic fragments as a means of moving through and unsettling repressive structures.

There Is a Fountain Even If Pale That Flows Beneath Us All

Hajra Waheed extends the voices of leaders of liberation struggles under incarceration through the language of sound, drawing, and painting.

Draw Withdraw Redraw

A group exhibition featuring work by AYO, Bani Abidi, Cinthia Marcelle, Felipe Mujica, Misheck Masamvu, Nohemi Perez, and Thierry Oussou. The exhibition foregrounds recognition, resistance, and reinvention, situating us in a state of ongoingness, returning to the same that is never the same. The artists featured in the exhibition use drawing as a way to begin a journey, withdrawing to self-preserve and practice refusal and redraw to begin again, with a refreshed understanding.