Het vertrekpunt van de expositie Supporting Acts is de gedachte dat niets op zichzelf staat. Niets ‘verschijnt’ simpelweg – het wordt ondersteund, gepositioneerd, leesbaar gemaakt en geconditioneerd door voortdurende en meervoudige inspanningen, beslissingen en relaties. In deze tentoonstelling proberen we de waarde van het solitaire object, dat wat we vaak kunst noemen, te benaderen vanuit het systeem van relaties dat haar bestaan mogelijk en waardevol maakt.

De artistieke praktijken verzameld in deze tentoonstelling activeren en laten zien dat het idee van ‘support’ geen passieve achtergrond is, maar juist vormgeeft wat zichtbaar wordt en hoe. Zoals Céline Condorelli ons eraan herinnert: steun is geen neutrale handeling is, maar een bewuste keuze. Iets of iemand ondersteunen betekent een standpunt innemen en actief bijdragen. Hoe gaan artistieke praktijken hier mee om en wat zou juist een artistieke benadering kunnen zijn van ondersteuning, zowel geven als ontvangen?

Deze tentoonstelling richt zich op de productie van kunst en verzamelt werken die ondersteuning tastbaar maken – niet alleen als inhoud, maar ook als methode. De deelnemende kunstenaars tonen artistieke productie als een duurzame, sociale en procedurele handeling, waarbij ze de administratieve gebaren, de ritmes van onderhoud en de sociale kaders die daaraan ten grondslag liggen, betrekken. Door de workshop, de vergaderingen, het spreadsheet, het maken van aantekeningen, de repetities, de routines en de gezamenlijke maaltijden centraal te stellen, vraagt ​​Supporting Acts om aandacht te besteden aan datgene wat het alledaagse culturele leven door laat gaan.

Passend bij focus op het proces, starten we Supporting Acts ergens middenin. Een deel van de werken is al op 15 november te zien, tijdens de Open Studios van kunstenaars-in-residentie Marcus Kaiser en Heimprofi (Krista Burger). De werken beginnen te groeien (soms letterlijk), er wordt verzameld en geoefend. 

Op 29 november heten we je van harte welkom voor een bijzondere publieksdag van Supporting Acts, met performances van Tini Aliman & Cristiana Cott Negoescu, Salim Bayri, Muxingye Chen samen met Nakano Blu. 

Voor de data voor de verschillende workshop kijk in onze agenda!

EN] The starting point of the exhibition Supporting Acts is the idea that nothing exists in isolation. Nothing simply “appears” – it is supported, positioned, made legible, and conditioned through ongoing and multiple efforts, decisions, and relationships. This exhibition seeks to approach the value of the solitary object – what we often call art – through the system of relationships that makes its existence possible and meaningful.

The artistic practices gathered in this exhibition demonstrate that the idea of “support” is not a passive background, but actively shapes what becomes visible and how. As Céline Condorelli reminds us, support is not a neutral act but a conscious choice. To support something or someone is to take a stance and contribute actively. How do artistic practices engage with this, and what might an artistic approach to support – both giving and receiving – look like?

This exhibition focuses on the production of art and presents works that make support tangible – not only as content but also as method. The participating artists depict artistic production as a sustainable, social, and procedural act, encompassing administrative gestures, rhythms of maintenance, and the social frameworks that underlie them. By foregrounding workshops, meetings, spreadsheets, note-taking, rehearsals, routines, and shared meals, Supporting Acts invites attention to the everyday practices that sustain cultural life.

In keeping with our focus on process, we’re starting Supporting Acts somewhere in the middle. Part of the works can already be seen on 15 November during the Open Studios of artists-in-residence Marcus Kaiser and Heimprofi (Krista Burger). The works are beginning to grow (sometimes literally), materials are being gathered, and rehearsals are underway.

On 29 November, you’re warmly invited to a special public day of Supporting Acts, with performances by Tini Aliman & Cristiana Cott Negoescu, Salim Bayri, and Muxingye Chen together with Nakano Blu.

information about the works:

___ Zhixin Angus Liao
Supporting Acts, 2025
Funding writing, graphic design, communication, production, and Goodluck stamp together with the Greylight Projects team.

When Zhixin Angus Liao finished his three-month residency at Greylight Projects at the end of 2023, it ended in an invitation to organize “a project”. This sending that turned into an opening reversed the initial gesture of being a temporary guest into being a ‘host’.
Resonating with the idea of ‘supporting acts’, Angus’s work for this “project” became a moment to bring in friends, to build, maintain, mediate, find funding (!), clean, paint, install, courier, and cook.

The exhibition itself is just one point in a longer arc, preceded by the foundational (and often invisible) labour that makes its existence possible, and followed by the care required after it comes to an end. His contribution to Supporting Acts has been to act as its host: to understand the work as relational, and to construct a structure that could hold it and carry it to this moment. Sometimes, infrastructures can be artworks too.

___ Tini Aliman & Cristiana Cott Negoescu
There Is a Home Waiting Within
Sound, performative gestures
45–60 minutes

There Is a Home Waiting Within explores the emotional and psychological states of migration, displacement, belonging, and co-existence within society and ecosystems. The performance seeks to address sociocultural and class relations connected to movement across borders and psychological divides shaped by migration.

Set within a transitional hallway, two characters inhabit parallel storylines without spoken text.

Cristiana Cott Negoescu performs a repetitive act of displacement, methodically moving sculptural elements one by one along the corridor, dismantling and reconstructing them at the opposite end. In dialogue with her movements, sound artist Tini Aliman performs a live composition, using Cristiana’s body as a circuit to activate and modulate sound. This repetitive labour becomes a choreography of migration and renewal. Through this exchange, the sonic field transforms into a tactile negotiation with space and memory.

___ Felipe Mujica
Mijn Klok Staat Still, 2025
Recycled fabric, embroidery cotton, threadwork, and hardware
Group of eight “curtains”, dimensions variable

As a way to connect with the local public, Mujica produces textile works that incorporate local knowledge and materials through shared labour and group discussions around each project. In this sense, each “curtain” is site-specific, adapting to and learning from the context in which it is produced.

The starting point is a series of designs made in a notebook using the same grid, each one a variation within a defined set of rules. A video of the notebook is available as a way to exhibit the complete group. For Greylight Projects, the curtains are produced during a five-day workshop, open to everyone, with or without textile experience. The works are fabricated using recycled fabric, employing patchwork and embroidery. The installation aims to create an ephemeral, permeable architectural solution that interacts with the whole building—within and outside what is considered the exhibition space. Both the spatial interactivity and the collective production process seek to open Mujica’s work, striving for an active and participatory viewer.

___ Muxingye Chen
Null = (“loop-feedback”) — Between the Steenberg and the Signal, 2025
Sand and vibrator, dimensions variable

Null = (loop-feedback) marks the first phase of Muxingye Chen’s research into vibration as both material phenomenon and cultural memory. Developed through fieldwork around Heerlen’s Steenberg, a remnant of the city’s coal-mining past, the project transforms the site’s hidden tremors into sound, light, and motion. Using geophones, vibration sensors, and generative image systems, Chen builds an environment that listens to the industrial ground itself.

The installation translates field data into resonant frequencies and visual feedback, allowing vibration to speak as a language of place and memory. Visitors enter an immersive field where sound and image echo the afterlife of extraction and labour.

Evolving from Chen’s earlier collaboration BO (波) with new-media artist Lei Yang, the project extends the meditative feedback system of sand and brainwaves into the mechanical hum of post-industrial terrain. Constructed from discarded electronics and industrial remnants, the work becomes both instrument and archive, resonating with histories of energy and transformation.

A live performance with Nakano Blu further expands this vibrational archive into real-time audiovisual improvisation—translating Steenberg’s industrial frequencies into rhythmic compositions that transform noise into memory, vibration into renewal.

___ Junhao Xiang & Display Distribute
Otherwise Dispatch #2: One by one, together, apart, and distributed, 2025

Within systems architecture, comparisons are often made between the organisation of centralised versus decentralised and/or distributed networks. While the movements of Display Distribute appear at varying moments to journey through all three modes of “networking”, recent collaborative experiments in the artistic realm have witnessed the unfolding, expansion, as well as contraction of the net.

Otherwise Dispatch #2: One by one, together, apart, and distributed puts such shapes shifting into motion, extending the journey of former book dispatches to the Netherlands by bringing them back together for a temporary suitcase library within “Support Structures”.

Junhao Xiang, a reader, courier, and now co-conspirator of Display Distribute, serves as the link between a radical logistics and a new radical imagination.

The solidarity tokens they have especially created for the exhibition also serve as the building blocks for all kinds of organisation, and these, along with the playful forms of “otherwise” that unmarked seeds may fruit, make up Otherwise Dispatch #2’s rebus of knowledge distribution for a sociopolitically oppressive climate and disaster era.

If you want, I can next produce a fully unified, exhibition-ready version with all four works in a clean catalogue/press/website style. Do you want me to do that?

___ Fabiola Burgos Labra
Mummies – Mami (Heerlem), 2025
Cotton and vegetables, dimensions variable

Mummies–Mami is a process-based, community-engaged art project that explores themes of temporality, ecological interdependence, and collective care through textile sculptures.

The project consists in creating a series of sculptures made with knitted vegetables, installed in gardens across Heerlen. Over time, these sculptures will transform naturally through exposure to weather and the environment. The project integrates material research, participatory workshops, and ecological discourse in Heerlen, culminating in an exhibition at Greylight Projects that showcases both the evolving sculptures and community documentation of their caretaking process.

Through workshops and discussions, participants will explore human connections to food systems, botany, and sustainability, embedding art-making within broader ecological themes. By merging artistic exploration with observation and community participation, the project extends Fabiola’s ongoing research into textile art as a medium for engaging with ecological cycles and cultural preservation.

___ Salim Bayri
Water for dust, 2025
Keynote presentation, dehydrated fava bean soup, Dutch water, oil painting, promotional installation online shop: www.bissara.salimbayri.com

Bayri Salim has found a way to turn a familiar North African recipe into an instant soup powder called Bissara. This fava bean powder is a product you can buy and enjoy, but for Salim, it is also a way to speak about drought, climate change, the instantification of taste, and office culture.

Today, one of the most sold food products in the world, with 29 billion packets a year, is made by Salim Group, the Indonesian instant noodle company. Salim seizes this name coincidence to insert himself into their history as the company’s heir. In his imagined future, the group expands to North Africa, where food no longer needs dehydration, because everything is already dry.

CEO Bayri Salim is coming to Heerlen to reconnect with a branch of his family who migrated there in the 1980s and preserved ancestral recipes. In his keynote, he will share the success story of Salim Group, their challenges, and their opportunities for Dutch partnerships.
Afterwards, guests will be invited to taste their latest product: Bissara, the fava bean soup powder.

___ Aarti Sunder
Ghost Cut – Some Clear Pixels Amongst Many Black Boxes, 2023
Some Clear Pixels Amongst Many Black Boxes foregrounds the labour that allows automation to appear smooth and “smart”.

It is about the people who quietly train and maintain AI systems; remote workers on platforms like MTurk, Clickworker or Crowdflower. Sunder’s work addresses how these global platforms outsource risk and precarity in a postcolonial techno reality through what is defined as ‘ghost work’. Through a sharing of experiences by these invisibilized workers, Ghost Cut shows how data gathering, processing, and annotation are always subjective, situated, creative, and dependent on real-world infrastructures.

The word ghost indicates that it is not just the physical absence of a person doing a particular job, but the pretense that such a person does not even exist. The so-called silent laboring hand behind the magic of technology however requires spontaneity, creativity, and cultural interpretation.
Video HD, 22 min, In English, Tamil and Hindi