reclame

What if the mirror sings back at you? In the half-light of the staircase, a figure appears. The baton twirls, the glance winks, the hip sways. There is no need for a costume to become someone else. Here, the performance is a way to rehearse the self, to stage softness, to multiply and repeat. Not to transform into someone else, but to reveal, and sometimes exaggerate. Let humour provoke. Let clumsiness find its charm. KC is focused, in the spotlight. And it’s about to begin.

Masaki Komoto (JP/NL) is a multi-disciplinary artist whose practice moves between textile craft – embroidery, knitting – and performance, weaving together tactile processes and live presence. Across these mediums, Komoto explores identity, humour, and the subtle tension between sincerity and play.

Since 2020, he has been sharing karaoke videos online. In the first, he appeared in a silk scarf and a wide-brimmed hat, performing a hit by Deng Lijun. This marked the birth of his persona Karaoke Cowboy, which continues to evolve through videos and live acts.
On his Instagram, these videos serve as a testing ground: for dance moves, baton twirling, odd performances, spontaneous reactions, and moments of comic relief. These clips often inform his live performances, where the setlist is loosely shaped by the venue and context.
Underneath the humour and lo-fi aesthetic lies a deeper reflection on how we define and present ourselves online, in public, and in performance. Through KC, Komoto questions the roles we adopt, the expectations we subvert, and how performance might offer a space to be both authentic and deliberately out of place.

For reclame and SYSTEMA, Komoto proposes a new live act of KC. The performance shifts from the familiar to the unexpected, embracing the feeling of being ‘off’ in an art context while offering a sincere humorous experience.

SYSTEMA is an annual gathering of non-profit and collaborative art initiatives in Marseille.

Will doodles disappear? The act of doodling is a form of daydreaming, a moment when one can detach from the act of creation. The traces left are not controlled, but rather executed by an impertinent hand. Doodles are so physical and yet haven’t invaded the digital surface. They still need paper, a pen, and perhaps a long phone call to exist. This exhibition attempts to capture the essence of doodling, how we pass time, daydream, and woolgather, contemplating the spinning drum of the washing machine. The beauty of boredom allows time to be healing.
Pillow Talk presents works that can be described as intimate conversations: from sharing knots of memories, Chris Marker’s Dialector eerie chatbot, to the putrid materiality of time.

Paula Garcia Sans is a visual artist and 3D designer. Their artistic practice develops around the use of 3D, game engine and text-to-image softwares, and explores the notion of artificiality and its diverse impact on our identities.

Maria Nolla’s work is the result of an intimate relationship with organic materials and found objects that have scatological and abject presences in the sanitised urban and exhibition context.

Aurélia Noudelmann is a curator and social designer whose practice focuses on hybrid spaces where new creation-based dialogues can be facilitated, and on the re-appropriation of crafts dominated by men.

Paladar Space is an emerging project space for experimental art founded by artist laury fong gonzalez, currently hovering between the Arts District, Los Angeles and Jordaan, Amsterdam.

The Clean Brothers Wasserette is a full and self-service laundromat located in Jordaan, Amsterdam, since 1987. Many thanks to Adriana Pingas and Nes for hosting us.


The Dunkin Donuts ‘Munchkins’ are small round bites of dough that come in all kinds of flavours. First sold as ‘Donut Holes’ in the 70s, they were marketed as left overs from the removed centres of the doughnuts. As a child, I believed this story to be true, an ingenious way to reduce food waste, and as it turns out, it was.
Some time ago, I stood in a store holding a broken piece of their display that I wanted to take home with me, wondering if to take it would be an act of stealing, or if it would be possible to buy something that is not for sale. Can we buy the bone before the meat? With Hole Hold Whole, we attempt to celebrate the valuable waste, the discarded matter and the donut holes, and we cherish this absent space where nothing becomes something in a store that appears to sell everything.

Eleni Papazoglou is a Greek artist working with languages of value and exchange. With a background in graphic design, she uses instruction-led processes, subversion, cut & paste methods to make assemblages, performances, site specific interventions and books. They are a co-founder of the nomadic project space On Wheels, a space dedicated to exploring what it means to be in public, and they practice graphic design under the alias Call Your Friends. Eleni is a lecturer at the London College of Communication, UAL.

Eleni received a BA (Hons) in Graphic Design from Camberwell College of Art and a MA (Hons) from the Royal College of Art. Previous exhibitions include Rear View (solo), BIBLIOTEKA (London, 2023), How It Feels, SET (London, 2023) ,Prizing Eccentric Talent, P.E.T. Projects (Athens, 2022), I Love You Forever, (Athens, 2022), Collective Display of Affection, Camden Arts Center (London, 2022), Head2Head, KEIV (Athens, 2021), Squeezebox, Collective Ending (London, 2021).

Tabakshuis is a corner shop that sells convenient products, cold drinks, cigarettes, newspapers and stationery items.
Many thanks to the owner Buick Ismaili for hosting us.
reclame #6 is kindly supported by the Amsterdams Fonds voor de Kunst.

In the summer 2021, reclame presented De grote vakantie by Eva Pel in Buikslotermeerplein on the last days of the temporary lease of an artist studio. Soon after, the space turned into a Getir dark store. Pel’s work was an ode to the holidays while being a soft protest against the (in)visible forces of Amsterdam real estate. For the reiteration of the work, Pel chose Betondorp and specially a vacant house, made of concrete 100 years ago. The work is a celebration and once again pertinent for many reasons: reclame still up after resisting its first location’s eviction; the care given to the houses; the people who care; and us, cheering all together to the summer holidays.

reclame #2.1 will take place in the context of Coming Soon Together 1, organised by Eva H. Pel and Isfrid A. Siljehaug, together with Rory Pilgrim and Luuk Schröder. Meeting point: Middenweg 390 from 16:00, followed by a walk, a home and a borrel.

Eva Pel (NL) is an artist based in Amsterdam. With a background in artistic research and human geography with studies in Amsterdam, Los Angeles and The Hague her work points directly to the ‘here and now’, to the banalities and tensions of our society. She employs her interest in how social behaviour in the built environment is affected and changed by the everyday life, a life that is influenced by our shared space, digital and physical. Her work manifests itself in a range of media, such as video, photography and objects. Recently Pel had exhibitions in Toronto (Inter/access), Liège (Art au Centre) and The Hague (The Balcony). Last year she lived in the mountains of Switzerland during her artist residency period at Fundaziun Nairs in Scuol.

Black screens are enclosed in glass shelves, shiny without a scratch. Accessories for care, protective cases in plastic sleeves, urgent repairs to get back on call. A nursery for our precious devices that give us the love we need. Then come the people, their hands, their strange behaviours, the grotesque situations and sad coincidences captured by chance with a phone camera. These moments, framed by photography and reframed by the display, appear where the screens were once silent, bringing noise to the quiet shop. The offline space, where the digital is reduced to components and broken screens, presents a new feed of printed images, akin to analogue scrolling. Ordinary scenes transform into beautiful accidents, impossible to stage, becoming mirror images, a reminder of family portraits, both comforting us in our sense of belonging and causing anguish from that very same belonging.

Eefje Stenfert (NL) is a multi-disciplinary artist based in Amsterdam using ‘42923703q’ as a pseudonym, equally being the name of a project in itself. 42923703q represents a large archive of imagery that aims to contemplate the beautiful absurdity of Stenfert’s everyday recordings. Using photographs and videos as her raw material, she crops, re-frames and makes collages, resulting in creating series, albums and stories by the new connections she suggests. 42923703q likes to re-enter the mundane by showing these series of images in spaces that stock-photos and other pretty-pictures occupy, be it on Instagram, websites, billboards, advertisement frames, shops and other spaces where images are involuntarily consumed.

Fone Up is a store that offers phone repair services, as well as sells refurbished cell phones and accessories. Many thanks to the owner Othman Jaalouti for hosting us.
reclame #5 is kindly supported by the Amsterdams Fonds voor de Kunst.

On the highway to hell, call a space a spade, especially when a sparrow in the hand is better than the pigeon on the roof. In French, one would say call a cat a cat, but what’s lost in translation is whispered down the lane. By trial and error, step-by-step and maybe on one’s toes, a word spoken cannot be recalled. Lest we forget, it’s hard to remember the swan song. Off the beaten path, we are waiting for the snail-mail and on the tip of my tongue, the sentence pulled a vanishing act. Disappeared into thin air, the name of the game becomes the bird of passage. And once gone, we come to the end of the road.

The circulation of people and commodities constitute the nodal point of a work questioning thresholds, limits, borders of spaces, ideas, values and practices. A hijacked city water circuit, a RoRo cargo ship transporting old European women, upgraded business cards, cucumber doors, a password, Belgian samosas, political discourses; Marine Kaiser’s tenuous installations play with exaggeration and contradiction to build fictions rooted in their specific contexts.
Graduated from HEAD Geneva and erg Brussels, Marine Kaiser is a Swiss-French artist based in Brussels and current resident of the Jan van Eyck Academie. Her work has lately been exhibited at Pavillon de l’Arsenal (Paris), AGB (Berlin), Manifesta 12 (Palermo), Le 18 (Marrakesh), Les Brasseurs (Liege), Palais de l’Athénée (Geneva), KANAL Centre Pompidou, Cunst-Link and CHEE (Brussels).

Marine Kaiser asked designer and screen printer Brent Dahl to not only print her work but also to freely design one sticker as an additional voice and perspective on this public object, which then took an unexpected detour. Text by Lisa Sudhibhasilp and Dutch translation by Roberta Petzoldt.

www.marinekaiser.ch

With Kapsalon, AVOIDSTREET plays the field between fast food and slow culture — each one influencing the other. Much like sportswear entering high fashion, the iconic Rotterdam snack is on its way to becoming national heritage. AS navigates between traditions and values, shifting trivialities into trendy aesthetics. The Kapsalon uniform has to be worn for excessive dancing under artificial lights and running until the first beads of sweat give way to exhaustion.

AVOIDSTREET is a multi-disciplinary design practice that fuses fashion, graphic design, and performance in a rhizomatic way. AS focuses on showing the beauty of the banal and projecting ‘high-gloss luxury’ onto the everyday. Initiated by Eduardo León, Peruvian-Italian graphic designer and artist based in Amsterdam.

Snacks is a vending machine and exhibition space on the Ten Katemarkt in Amsterdam.
Thanks to Mariana Jurado Rico for playing music for the finissage.

A while ago I decided to never ever again accept requests to exhibit in temporary vacant/anti-kraak art spaces. This is because, in my opinion, these spaces indirectly fuel gentrification. I can explain this later. But since I find reclame a sympathetic art initiative, Lisa a nice person, and even more after discovering some interesting information about the owner of this building, for the last time I said yes.

Eva Pel (NL) is an artist living and working in Amsterdam. With a background in artistic research and geography her work shifts between political engagement and subtle mediation. She employs her interest in how social behaviour is affected and changed by our everyday life, a life that is influenced by our shared space, digital and physical. Her work manifests itself in a range of media, such as video, photography, objects and publications. Since 2013 Pel has been teaching art theory at the pre-course of the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam. Her work has been exhibited amongst others at Frankendaal Foundation (Amsterdam), Witzenhausen Gallery NY, the University of Amsterdam, van Eyck Academie and Salzamt Linz. Her work will be shown at This art fair 26-29 August 2021 at the Kromhouthallen in Amsterdam Noord.
Eva Pel is generously supported by the Mondriaan Fund.

A text was produced for the occasion, find it here.
Thanks to Lae Schäfer for the live drawings.
Images from Agnes Denes, Wheatfield — A Confrontation, Battery Park Landfill, Downtown Manhattan, 1982

For the first reclame presentation, Jungmyung Lee proposes a visual translation of “hamstering”. This expression, originating from the German Hamsterkauf, found use as hamsteren in the Netherlands during WW1 and was eventually co opted by Albert Heijn as a marketing slogan. Most recently, the notion was revived during the lockdown due to the negative effects of individual stockpiling. For Lee, this panic buying starts with the visual abundance of promotional messages intended to lure consumers. As a result, her overloaded, and thus absurd collage, proves to be inefficient and furthermore becomes an anti-marketing strategy in and of itself.

Jungmyung Lee is a typographer from South Korea interested in the intersection of human emotions and typographic forms. She manifests that typefaces have other interests besides words and her primary focus is telling stories and exploring the life of typefaces and their emotions.

For the first display and as an introduction to the project, Sudhibhasilp proposes to contemplate the object itself. The blue colour represents a generic space of the empty, like a background standard. By displaying the board entirely empty and blue, the object gains a new presence in contrast to the usual invisibility of its structure.

Lisa Sudhibhasilp (FR) has developed her work and research around the concept of display. Researching how commodities, artefacts or artworks are presented and which procedures are employed to give them value, she uses – and re-uses – certain structures and aesthetics to question the status and hierarchy of the object shown, blurring the line between objects that are seen as displays and displays that are seen as objects.