Kapsalon Charlois
G, Marwan
28. – 30.03.2025
Marwan, Isabelle Sully and Valentina Curandi, Occupational Health & Safety Fund 2019–2025. Photo: Philip Graysc
Exhibition view Kapsalon Charlois with a work by G. Photo: Philip Graysc
Marwan, Isabelle Sully and Valentina Curandi, Occupational Health & Safety Fund 2019–2025. Photo: Philip Graysc
Kapsalon Charlois. Photo: Job Willems
G, IM SORRY, 2024.
Marwan, Isabelle Sully and Valentina Curandi, Occupational Health & Safety Fund 2019–2025. Photo: Philip Graysc
In hair salon Kapsalon Charlois, the collective artist-run practice space Marwan, in collaboration with Rib, presents Regarding Property: Occupational Health & Safety Fund 2019–2025 and the videowork IM SORRY (2024) by G.
IM SORRY (2024) by artist G is a video filmed in Marwan’s storage and boiler room. G channels her British politeness, repeatedly chanting “I’m sorry” while pointing at various objects. The video turns these apologies into a ritual, drawing attention to the maintenance and labor that sustain the space
Regarding Property: Occupational Health & Safety Fund 2019–2025 is an artwork by Isabelle Sully and Valentina Curandi. A small portion of obtained subsidies is consistently but intermittently funneled into an Occupational Health & Safety Fund. For each artistic project, €50 is allocated to the fund, which the artist can use to implement a safety measure. This measure can be for the artist themselves, the space, its visitors, the surrounding street, or even the city—ultimately, the recipient decides how the fund is used.
Over the past six years, the OHS fund at Marwan has supported a diverse set of safety measures. The first was a fire blanket for the boiler room, installed by the fund’s initiators, Isabelle Sully and Valentina Curandi. Evita Vasiljeva dedicated her contribution to a year-long Dutch liability insurance. Yashaswini Raghunandan invested in additional headphones to ease listener and viewer fatigue. Erika Roux and Victor Santamarina gathered seven umbrellas to shelter visitors during rain, enabling social distancing. Reinier Vrancken transformed his allocation into a sauna gift voucher for curators Tim and Tirza. Karin Iturralde Nurnberg purchased a meditation cushion to facilitate meditation sessions during the exhibition are my children are my parents. Vala Sigþrúðar Jónsdóttir hand-knitted socks for the Marwan team, offering warmth and comfort during winter installations. Finally, Nell Schwan acquired UV filters for the windows to protect sensitive works on display.
Marwan is a collective artist run practice space founded by Tirza Kater and Tim Mathijsen in 2017, and run with Dieuwertje Hehewerth from 2021 to 2024. It is a collective body that practices making space by stretching, shrinking, s l o w i n g, growing limbs, and hibernating. Marwan aims to build sustainable, supportive scaffoldings for artists in and around Amsterdam to practice and celebrate their work.
As an ongoing exercise in exhibition making and programme composition, Marwan questions dominant notions of production and efficiency that often make cultural work unsustainable. It works from where those involved are, personally and collectively, and develops a shared mode of production with the people, objects, and spaces connected to its shifting form.
Marwan currently operates as a publicly funded, free access exhibition space at Fokke Simonszstraat 23, Amsterdam
Isabelle Sully practices across art-making, curating, editing and writing. Working with feminist histories in mind, she takes the mechanisms and materiality of administration as the main focus within her work, developing conceptual projects that span experimental writing, sculpture, performance, exhibition-making and publishing.
She received a Bachelor of Fine Art from the Victorian College of the Arts, Melbourne/Naarm, in 2013 and a Master of Arts (Art Praxis) from the Dutch Art Institute, Arnhem, in 2017. Originally from Melbourne/Naarm, she now lives in Rotterdam where she is the founding editor of Unbidden Tongues, co-editor of Tangents and co-curator of Playbill. Her involvement with the administrative sphere of institutional practice played out in her previous role as assistant director-curator (2020–2024) at Kunstverein, Amsterdam, and currently as artistic director (2024–) at A Tale of A Tub, Rotterdam.
Valentina Curandi (she/her) is an art practitioner interested in non-theatrical performance and the performativity of languages. Her work combines performance and text through live acts, printed matter, video, and sound. She often starts from normative and prescriptive language—like contracts and protocols—to reflect on the tension between standardized language and embodied needs and desires.
She has created commissioned projects for Kunstlicht, Marwan, The Physics Room, the 16.ma Quadriennale di Roma, Konstfak, Centrale Fies, Kunstraum Munich, ar/ge kunst, Museum of Art Fort Lauderdale, VIAFARINI, the New York Art Book Fair, Flux Factory, and the Center for Book Arts.
Valentina studied Art Praxis at the Dutch Art Institute and recently began a Ph.D. in Artistic Practice Research with the MERIAN program. Her research explores how living art practitioners relate to death and dying, and their wishes regarding their artistic afterlife.