I spent just over half a year interning as a Communications Assistant at W139, a contemporary art and production space in central Amsterdam, Netherlands. During this time, I assisted the team with the organisation and delivery of three core exhibitions, Dead Skin Cash, Substitutes, and W139 hosts..., as well as several collaborative projects and events. Working closely with the Communications Manager, I helped design, share and distribute communications and marketing materials, both digital and print, such as flyers, posters and exhibition texts. I also worked on the curatorial text for Philip Gufler's exhibition Substitutes, an excerpt of which you can read below.
I further supported the team at events and openings in both a communications capacity, creating event pages, sending out invitations, managing guest lists, and ad hoc tasks such as set up, greeting visitors and ticketing. I also occasionally took on the role of exhibition host, welcoming visitors and talking to them about the work on show and the history of the space.
Dead Skin Cash was an exhibition by artists Salim Bayri and Ghita Skali. The exhibition was a playful and controversial riff on the phrase “selling your own skin”, in which the pair zoomed in on the ambiguities within our relationship with dead skin by creating a parallel economy through the medium, offering €20 per gram.
We tried to match the playfulness and subversiveness of the show with our marketing and communications, creating stickers and business cards that were distributed around the city with the slogan 'Get Money for your Dead Skin'. As well as videos of the artists handing out wads of cash on social media. These efforts contributed to the slightly shocking but ultimately thought-provoking aspect of the exhibition, which became a unique talking point in Amsterdam's cultural scene.
The opening night of the exhibition was attended by over 800 people and received a number of reviews from the press, including Mister Motley and VICE NL.
dead skin.
Substitutes was a group show initiated by the artist Philip Gufler which brought together contemporary work and archival pieces to trace a shared, intergenerational narrative of queer resistance against heteronormative discourses, conventional familial structures, and rigid binaries.
As many of the artists featured in the exhibition were not from the Netherlands, we focused our communication efforts on reaching communities in Amsterdam with whom the exhibition might resonate and who are marginalised and underrepresented in the city, namely LGBTQ+. We did this both through programming, such as a collaboration with IHLIA, an LGBTI public library in the city, and through the distribution of promotional materials - flyers and posters - in specific locations and areas.
The diversification of our audience was evident in the visitor surveys I created to be carried out during the exhibition. The exhibition itself also received several positive reviews, including e-flux and Da Witte Raaf.
You can find the full text here.
W139 hosts... was a rotating seven-week programme that offered makers and initiatives the opportunity to present new projects or work-in-progress for a week at W139. It aimed to provide a platform for communities to meet and exchange ideas, and to enrich Amsterdam’s artistic ecosystem.
The creative practitioners and projects were selected through an open call, which asked them to propose projects that they felt were urgent and relevant. Although my internship ended before the opening of the exhibition, I supported the team in the planning and implementation of the exhibition by assisting with the design of the open call, including printing and distributing posters and flyers, creating intake forms, and selecting and rejecting proposals.
For the exhibition, I had the opportunity to do a risograph printing workshop and organised the delivery of promotional materials to key venues.
Find out more about W139, upcoming exhibitions and events here.