FRIDAY AT MELLY: Free Events & Free Entrance
12–9 pm
Looking for something to do this Friday?
Explore our current exhibitions for free from 6 PM during Kunstavond, and join us for two free events throughout the day.
Free Events
The Artist Shift XL: Potluck + TGIF, Tea Time
Friday 12 June 2026
12:00 PM – 16:30 PM
Participation free (registration required)
The Artist Shift is a meet-up where creatives from various disciplines and diverse entrepreneurs come together to tackle their postponed tasks behind their laptops.
A Mic of One’s Own
Friday 12 June 2026
7:00–9:00 PM (doors open 18:30 PM)
Free entrance (get your free ticket here)
An Open Mic performance evening in collaboration with The Writer’s Guide (to the Galaxy), responding to the theme of resistance, inspired by the exhibition Prisoners of Love: Until the Sun of Freedom by Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme.
Exhibitions
During Kunstavond on Friday, all current exhibitions at Kunstinstituut Melly are open from 6:00 to 9:00 PM. Admission is free from 6:00 PM onwards.
This evening offers the opportunity to explore three exhibitions across the building:
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.
