Join us at Rozenstraat for the final opening in Melted for Love’s three-part exhibition programme across Amsterdam. As the last chapter to open, this evening offers a chance to gather, reconnect, and experience the works together in a welcoming setting.
The exhibition opening features a special presentation by Christian Nyampeta – an artist, filmmaker, and writer whose practice spans contemporary art, literature, and philosophy, and whose work has been shown internationally at major institutions including the Venice Biennale and Tate Modern. Nyampeta will perform Search Sweet Country, a lyrical rendition of songs of love, loss, and overcoming; or, in the words of Cameroonian author and journalist Ntone Edjabe, ‘the what we keep after everything has been washed away – through catastrophes such as floods and hurricanes, and human-made disasters’. Assembled and composed over the last decade, the performance offers a brief reprieve from these times, in the company of artists, musicians, theorists, and other figures whose ideas and lyrics are covered and evoked.
The exhibition asks how we grieve or memorialise violence that is still ongoing, and how dispersed communities sustain ancestral knowledge while collectivising to seek justice. These questions unfold through moving-image and movement-based works that stay attuned to losses that continue, recur, or refuse closure.
Eglė Budvytytė gathers communities of death-care, preparing to become part of the soil and air. Extending this attunement to our surroundings, Eliana Otta collaborates with non-human species in the Peruvian Amazon to imagine sounds that remain after Indigenous land defenders have been murdered. A poetic tribute to the un/dead by Christian Nyampeta and Kivu Ruhorahoza reflects on bonds that extend beyond a single lifetime. Nikolay Karabinovych introduces As I'm going to bed, I think of Kinkerstraat, a sound walk experienced via visitors’ headphones and smartphones, that reveals the Ukrainian city of Odessa as a 'ghost geography'.
This exhibition at Rozenstraat forms one chapter of Melted for Love’s three-part Exhibition programme across Amsterdam. All three exhibition locations, W139, Arti et Amicitiae, and Rozenstraat, will be open during the entire Biennial from Wednesday to Sunday, 12:00–20:00. The exception is Monday, 2 March, when the exhibition will be open from 12:00 to 17:00.
The exhibition opening is a free event. After the opening, visitors can purchase a single ticket for each venue or choose a combined ticket that grants access to all locations – W139, Arti et Amicitiae, and Rozenstraat. The tickets are not dated, and visitors can use them during the general visiting hours, excluding the performance events.
