With Love Nieuw West 3

With Love Nieuw West is a series of three art exhibitions with a public program in DAY Collective studio at broedplaats Lycka in Sloterdijk. This series is focused on the makers from Amsterdam Nieuw-West. It starts from September and finishes in December 2024. The series is dedicated to works and practices that relate to the subject of transcendental love. We see it as love that transcends categories, heals, and contributes to peace. We live in a time when polarization resulted in a new wave of planetary crisis: the division of body, mind and soul, nature and culture, individual and collective. With Love is a reaction to the current situation. This exhibition is focused on fascination of beauty, erotics and sexuality. The accent is not only on human relations but also material ones.

The Revenge Of The Subaltern

Sarah Ben Messaoud (1994) is a creative from Amsterdam Nieuw-West. With her background in digital design and sociology, she translates contemporary discourses into performative poetry and tapestry art.

The rugs made by Sarah invite queer audiences, particularly those connected to Arab and Islamic cultures, into a dialogue about the rich, complex histories of gender, sexuality, and beauty. Traditionally, the voices of the subaltern—marginalized identities excluded from historical records—were silenced, especially regarding intimate dynamics between elite men and younger, passive individuals. What might these individuals have shared about love, identity, and self-expression if they hadn’t been erased by patriarchal and colonial narratives? Tufted into this piece is the tension between traditional interpretations and emerging queer and feminist voices within Muslim communities. Each thread challenges the rigid binaries imposed by colonial and patriarchal forces, reclaiming beauty as a celebration of fluid self-definition and resistance. Here, historical reflections meet contemporary struggles, telling stories of queer Muslims carving out spaces to be themselves and reclaiming narratives often deemed incompatible with their identities. This rug serves as a reminder: to be Muslim and queer is not only possible but part of a legacy of questioning, reimagining, and creating inclusive spaces for all. Beauty, love, and individuality are embraced here as acts of resilience and belonging. 

Source: Khaled El-Rouayheb, 2005

Anticipation of Touch

Lilian Beentjes is a Rotterdam-based artist, who has previously developed her work at Broedplaats Lycka. Through her process-based practice, she researches the materiality and functionality of objects. With a playful and compassionate approach she mostly creates sculptures, songs and jewelry; exploring her fascination with the relationship between the internal and external, as well as the material and immaterial. Her inspirations—such as crafts, physical expression, and everyday life—often serve as starting points for both her physical works and audio pieces.

For the series called Anticipation of Touch, featured in the exhibition With Love, Lilian researches the dynamic interactions between various materials through sculpture and installation. She explores what she describes as the "erotics" of materials: how they become active and animated through their relationships with one another. What is the flow of energy between different objects? What function does the in-between have? How will the materials perform when combined together? Through this research, she explores dialogues between space, objects, proximity, distance, and the nuances of touch—or the lack thereof. While creating, Lilian works to dissolve hierarchies among materials and practices; a rhinestone is as serious as welded metal, emotion weighs equally with rationality, and objects are free to embody multiple functions. 

Host or Publisher DAY collective