Kunsthuis Syb and If I Can’t Dance, I Don’t Want To Be Part Of Your Revolution present Tidal Gatherings: Leakage – Passage – Spillage, a performative symposium at Kunsthuis SYB on June 21–22.

Leakage – Passage – Spillage is the second iteration of an ongoing experimental project on the intersections of water, ecology, and Dutch colonialism, curated and initiated by Chandra Frank. Through a moving trajectory of events, Tidal Gatherings examines how the workings of race, control, mastery and order are deeply embedded in the Dutch landscape and its practices of water management.

Responding to Kunsthuis Syb’s current trajectory, “Unpacking the House,” Tidal Gatherings lands in Friesland and considers how thinking with water can reshape our sense of space, time, and relation – dissolving dualities between inner and outer worlds. How do colonial ideas of water management relate to bodily tides, emotional floodings, and leakages? How does water inhabit our bodies, and how do we inhabit water? Where does water gather us? How do tides orient us?

Tidal Gatherings: Leakage – Passage – Spillage fosters interregional collaboration and aims to highlight the work of independent curators and thinkers. It is curated in close collaboration with Arnisa Zeqo (Kunsthuis Syb) and Sara Giannini (If I Can’t Dance).

Saturday, 21 June
10:30–11:00 Walk-in, welcoming coffee
11:00–11:30 Introduction by Chandra Frank, Sara Giannini and Arnisa Zeqo
11:30–13:00 Beavers and Barricades, Mikki Stelder
13:00–14:00 Lunch
14:00–15:00 a tear, drowning a river, drowning an ocean, Fazal Rizvi
15:15–16:15 untitled [after the head of the sand], Adjoa Armah
16:30–17:45 TIDE-OVER by Chandra Frank and Sara Giannini
18:00–19:00 Fire Over Water: Sipping Solstice, with a reading by Arnisa Zeqo
Sunday, 22 June
12:00–13:00 Collective mud walking at Paesens-Moddergat

NOTE:
The programme is in English and moves between Kunsthuis SYB and surrounding rural areas.
Kunsthuis SYB is a historical building and does not have an elevator, unfortunately parts of the programme are not accessible with a wheelchair.

On June 22, we also organise an additional event, a mudhike from Paesens-Moddergat. If you’d like to join, please indicate when signing up. For this event a fee of €15 is required. Participants need to arrange their own transport to the start of the walk. The hike starts at 12:00.

Chandra Frank is assistant professor of women’s, gender, and sexuality studies
at the University of Cincinnati and an independent curator. She is the 2024–2027 Taft Professor of the Public Humanities. Her interdisciplinary research focuses on feminist and queer of color movement work, possibilities of dissent, the politics of water, and the ways in which race and the environment work as terrains of power. She is a co-founding member of the Tidal Studies Group, a collaborative collective exploring the rhythms, currents, spillage, and intimacies of water.

Sara Giannini is an Italian-born curator, writer, and educator based in Amsterdam
whose practice weaves together language, performance, and critical fabulation. Since 2020, she has been a program curator at If I Can’t Dance, I Don’t Want To Be Part of Your Revolution, where she develops long-term research and artistic commissions in close dialogue with artists, writers, and thinkers exploring performance and performativity.

Mikki Stelder is an antidisciplinary researcher, writer, and educator who aspires to think with water against empire. Their visual practice explores the limits of the academic form. They are Assistant Professor in Cultural Studies at the University of Amsterdam.

Fazal Rizvi is an interdisciplinary artist from Pakistan. His inquiry rests between the personal, the social and the political. Having spent a few years thinking about the materiality and immateriality of the sea and its borders, Rizvi also keeps returning to the personal and familial as a place of trigger, contemplating on ideas of mourning, remembering, memorialising and monument making.

Adjoa Armah is an artist, educator, and writer. Her practice meditates on memory and the layered realities we carry within our bodies. Drawing on personal and collective histories, she navigates grief, cultural memory, and resilience, as they emerge within diasporic and post-colonial contexts.

Arnisa Zeqo is a curator, writer and educator who is currently director at Kunsthuis SYB. She was researcher in residence at the Rijksakademie (2021/2022), working on the intersection between performance, conceptual art and printed matter in the art ecology of Amsterdam in the 1980s. In 2015–2017 she worked for documenta 14 in Athens and Kassel, responsible for the education programs (aneducation) in Athens and initiator of the Society of Friends of Ulises Carrion within the Parliament of Bodies.