To further our conception of the box as a small-scale exhibition space, we regularly organise shows in the front space of our studio.

Anne-Claire MacKenzie
XOCOATL+

In Anne-Claire Mackenzie’s fiction, Martin Malibu’s love for chocolate mirrors his silent yearning for an unattainable love—bittersweet and never taken for granted.

The show guides the viewer through an audiovisual work where everyday food we overlook is transformed into seductive, aesthetically charged objects that awaken desire. Together with a handmade chocolate box, holding sculpted faux bonbons that resemble real confections but defy consumption, it blurs the line between illusion and reality. The deceptive allure of the box stirs an irresistible hunger, compelling viewers to confront their cravings for pleasure. This exploration forces a surrender to the longing for what tempts us yet remains just out of reach.

This playful illusion invites viewers to reflect on the tension between appearance and reality, arousing a hunger that extends beyond the edible to the deeply personal.

Anne-Claire Flora Mackenzie is an image maker with a theatrical methodology in how she directs and sets; within her photographic and film practice, symbolism plays a key role in the way she comes to translate emotions and concepts.

Her work intricately weaves themes of portraiture, fashion, identity, fantasy, staging, and absurdism.

Every project she undertakes reflects her ongoing exploration of the human body, mind, and desires. She strives to push her visual boundaries through collaborations and directions by blending the fantastical with the familiar, crafting images that are both surreal and personal.

Marnix Vinkenborg (a.k.a. Martin Malibu), a musical theater maker, composer, and performer living in Amsterdam.

He graduated with a bachelor's degree in electronic music composition at HKU in 2019 and with a master's degree in musical theater at ArtEZ in 2021. He created, wrote, and performed performances about penthouses, world disasters, and turtle doves. His music has been featured in films, fashion shows, theater shows, and commercials.

Marnix likes to be inspired by obscure pop music, dark comedy films, analog synthesizers, and vintage (bass) guitars. New stories with unconventional sounds.

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Our Voice Is a Crack
Levine Aviya

Opening on Friday 18 October 5-7
19 October - 27 October

Open in the weekends from 1 to 5
and on appointment during the week


Levine Aviya is an artist working in two realms. She writes autobiographical works of fiction and creates images that arise from photography and found footage. While studying Creative Writing at Artez, her internship with visual artist Joran van Soest led her to a fused practice in which image and language correspond with each other. Her first publication, Mischa Grey, is both a written story and a series of visuals works, ranging from mixed media to Toyobo prints. Whatever discipline she works in, she always starts out examining her own complexities. Somewhere along the way though, the deeply personal folds into the communal. Here a question emerges that is often left unasked: is there a hidden terrain of shared experience where people from opposite worlds can meet? 

Her new project, Our Voice Is a Crack, explores an experience that is both violent and liberating. In small fragments of prose a story is told: a young woman searches for a way to feel at ease in the world without having to succumb to the expectations and obligations that society places on her womanhood. Unemployed and aimless she wanders through a city that is slowly becoming too small for her. On these endless walks she starts seeing an unknown Uzbek woman in her mind’s eye. She sees her drowning at sea while her naked body is veiled by a centuries old paranja. Both in image and language the show is a vessel for the communal voice of womanhood expressed through two women living in opposite worlds. With a violent crack they articulate how the brokenness of the world is laid out inside them.

The outcome of Levine Aviya's project is presented at boox.space in an exhibition combining a series of framed works, a sound installation, and a publication.

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respectare
Justus de Rode & Tjitske Oosterholt

Opening on Friday 6 September 5-7 PM

7 September - 15 September
Open in the weekends from 1 to 5
and on appointment during the week

The complexity of interconnectedness in the world is difficult to grasp. Modern man often seeksrefuge in explanation and reasoning. But those who want to fully understand nature, or the world around them as a whole, will never succeed. We as modern humans will have to learn to find meaning again in the incomprehensible, the sublime, in mystery.

In respectare, Justus de Rode and Tjitske Oosterholt explore this interaction between reason and feeling in our perception of the world. The work explores the boundaries of photography: from its genesis to modern application. Using intuition as their starting point and guide, they question the core properties of photography: how does the image relate to reality?

The work offers a view free of interpretation and explanation, a view that, according to the artists, is at the basis of restored respect. Respect, from the Roman 're-spectare', means something like viewing anew; a fresh look without the noise of prejudices or ideas. By abandoning reason for a moment and giving space to mysticism, we feel a deeper contact with the world, we wonder again and will restore respect.

Justus de Rode (1997, Groningen, NL) lives and works in Amsterdam. In 2022, he graduated in Film & Photographic Studies at Leiden University. In 2023, he published his second book 'Mycelium', which was featured in Het Parool, Het Dagblad van het Noorden and several international magazines. His work has been shown at The Gallery Club and museum Belvédère among others. His work will be on show at Galerie Helder, The Hague, later this month.

Tjitske Oosterholt (1991, Amsterdam, NL) has moved from graphic design and artistic research to a creative practice in between, in which she aims to combine both intuitive and experimental visual images. In 2020, she received the ‘Kunstenaar Basis' grant from the Mondriaan Fund. Since then, she has done residencies in Portugal, Spain and the Netherlands, and her work has been shown nationally and internationally at multiple exhibitions and fairs. Tjitske is presented by ContourGallery from Rotterdam.

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a tale for a space and a window to a tale
Ira Grünberger

Opening on Friday 31 May 5-7 PM

1 June - 9 June
Open in the weekends from 1 to 5
and on appointment during the week

When looking through a window, are we looking into the past, or the future?
We look through to imagine, then turn inwards to dream.

The story that unfolds before you is resting somewhere between the walls of this space and the glass panes on the facade, but it much rather asks to be imagined. Imagine: once a family with twelve children lived in this space, with twelve stained-glass pieces decorating its window front. When they moved out, each sibling received one piece to keep as a memory.

This tale is about siblinghood beyond nuclear family, and belongs to the interrelated spaces between all things. Through imagery, Ira Grünberger looks for those connections in the Commonplace: tiny flowers wither on the hot surface of a car, while the same stinging rays of midday sun pierce a broken window. Composed as diptychs, the images are encompassed by steel frames, that never fully close. They provide space for stories to be told – a tale that is a tale of many.

Ira Grünberger is an interdisciplinary artist with a strong background in photography. They work across the mediums of photography and installation to explore the interconnectedness and temporality of human and non–human, and how their memory transcends and materializes in space. Photography, sculpture and writing are explored as tools to let memory surface and materialize, leading to a collaborative exploration of materials used in construction such as metal, glass, or clay. The research comes together in spatial re– and deconstructions where elemental and image–based processes are combined. In doing so, they aim to bend solid frameworks into something more palpable.

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Stills of Deeptime

Ster Borgman

Opening on Friday 19 April 5-7 PM

20 April - 28 April
Open in the weekends from 1 to 5
and on appointment during the week

As an artist, Ster Borgman works like a magical scientist, an alchemist. When you look at glass it acts like it is not moving, but when you look away it starts dripping and flowing everywhere. Ster visualizes this by working with glass and natural pigments.

This way, Ster has developed a liquid pigment for glass, using rust as a basis. Rust is something hybrid, something that grows and can overgrow. Rust tells a story about deep time; how it bursts from the earth in the form of iron and is then slowly oxidized by the rain.

In the oven, Ster melts two glass plates together with self-developed, liquid rust pigment in between. The melting glass catches the rust, which starts to boil and tries to escape the heat. Ultimately, the rust changes color due to the high temperature: from black to different shades of red.

These glass plates are, as it were, photographs of a moment in the deep time of the life of rust. But maybe someone accidentally breaks the glass after 8 years or even 800 years, the glass crumbles back into sand and the rust is finally released.

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Musculo-vegetal  
Chiel Lubbers

Opening on Saturday 9 December 2-7 PM

9 December - 17 December 2023
Open in the weekends from 1 to 5
and on appointment during the week

As a visual artist, Chiel Lubber’s motivation is built upon the embodied experience of an ‘inner-act’. This arises within the dynamic interplay between two entities and is distinguished by a bodily-felt affect. It serves as a means to capture his resonance with rippled structures in the natural and agricultural landscape.

Musculo-vegetal is a herbarium series embodying analogous research, delving into the parallels between fibers in plants and human muscle tissues. Through the intricate processes of dissecting, fermenting, and positioning fibers, Chiel’s artworks reveal the microscopic and macroscopic anatomical tissues of the abstracted aspects of our intimate anatomy. The essence of Musculo-vegetal lies in its aim to induce a meditative state, encouraging viewers to reflect on the life forms that constitute our bodies. It conveys the fundamental concept that we are resonant beings intricately intertwined with cosmic currents.

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Field Correspondence  
Bødvar Hole & Milah van Zuilen  

Opening on 21 October 2023 at 5

21 October - 29 October 2023
Open in the weekends from 1 to 5
and on appointment during the week


Field correspondence is a story of two researchers conducting fieldwork together. Their fieldwork has no particular focus or direction, allowing them to observe unexpectedly and reflect playfully. The researchers communicate their findings to each other through written notes, and a conversation emerges.

Together, they realise that the act of discovery is not always a solitary endeavour, but one that involves each other. As they write back and forth, they learn that the environment also participates in the dialogue.

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dot dot dot 

Benni Ciappini, Scott van Kampen-Wieling and Angelina Nonaj

Opening on 3 February 2023
3 February - 12 February 2023

Open in the weekends from 1 to 5
and on appointment during the week

Benni Ciappini, Scott van Kampen-Wieling and Angelina Nonaj are currently graduating at the Photography department of the Royal Academy of Arts in The Hague. 

dot dot dot is a group exhibition and box presentation created in dialogue between their three different yet correspondent practices.

This dialogue started as an investigation around the idea of ellipses, under diverse viewpoints: linguistic, visual, material, theoretical, speculative.

This research is also presented in the form of a non-linear publication, which combines, collects, and embodies the investigations led by the three artists.

dot dot dot can be experienced in the space as a conversation between words, drawings, and sculptural objects that subtly speak to each other.

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Betula spp. 
Milah van Zuilen

Opening on 2 December 2022 at 5

2 December - 18 December 2022
Open in the weekends from 1 to 5
and on appointment during the week


Betula spp. investigates a different approach to ecological fieldwork, with a focus on the genus Betula (birch). During Milah van Zuilen’s residency at Tuo Tuo, in Joutsa (Finland), the bark from fallen or felled birch trees was collected. The bark was dried, peeled into layers, cut into little squares and arranged into grids.

As part of this show, a series of 20 framed originals are available for sale in collector’s boxes, together with a folder containing a dried birch leaf and a leaflet providing insights into the artist’s method and research.

Milah gathers plant material according to self-imposed rules, and seeks similarities between scientific and artistic ways of looking at landscapes. The material gets transformed into squares and grids, referring to the shapes that characterise a very human perspective and presence. The square shapes and straight lines, paradoxically, emphasise the organic forms and patterns in the plant material. Also being a forest ecologist in training, the artist strives to bring the fields of art and ecology closer to each other, and to find another way of looking at the landscape - more earth-centered, rather than anthropocentric.

Milah van Zuilen graduated in Fine Arts & Photography from the Willem de Kooning Academy. Her graduation project 'Terrafuturism' won the 2021 Ron Mandos Young Blood Award and was acquired by Museum Voorlinden. She is also a co-founder of Jaro Milire, a space for ecology-related artist residencies in the Czech Republic. She is represented by Galerie Caroline O’Breen.

milahvanzuilen.com
instagram.com/__milah/

Milah van Zuilen will plant a birch tree for each work sold and will donate 25% of the remaining profit to The Pollinators. There is the possibility to pay in instalments.

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Opening on 21 October 2022 at 5

21 October - 6 November 2022
Open in the weekends from 1 to 5
and on appointment during the week

Zoë d’Hont shows a series of glass works that originates from her long-lasting interest in sound. The series is inspired by the noise spectrum; a range of eight different sound signals, named as colours, that correspond to a particular frequency, which the listener couples with specific material associations and states of mind. This sense of colour for noise signals is similar to the concept of timbre in music.

Zoë uses noise-cancelling foam to mold pieces of glass in a rippled pattern, resembling sound waves. The reflective surface of the glass gives the pieces an even more liquid, transformative appearance. She presents her collection of glass works in foam-lined boxes, as jewels meant to amplify the beauty of noise.

Zoë d'Hont invited writer Lenny van Gent to create a fictive story for each colour of noise, to lead the viewer into the different sound worlds. Each part guides us to a different frequency of existence. Eight colours, eight stories, eight spacetimes, in which reality slowly bends and nostalgia transforms into alienation. These stories are presented in a book accompanied by drawings from the artist.


zoedhont.com
instagram.com/zoedhont

With the kind support of Stichting Niemeijer Fonds and Jump! Talenthub.