Alternating Rhythms – OFFSPRING’s Constant Ballads at De Ateliers
Ten artists present their work to the public in this year’s OFFSPRING edition, Constant Ballads, curated by Isabelle Sully and designed by Maud Vervenne. Spread across De Ateliers’ maze-like building, the exhibition brings together a diverse group of artists working closely with material, technique and visual language. Each artist has their own rooms throughout the building, allowing the connections between the works emerge gradually, as we move through the space.
Entering Iiris Rihimäki’s room my focus immediately goes to the floor pieces. Specifically, the floral print sunbed, Creamer (Time folds in half to be cut into a snowflake), 2025, facing the large window, half covered with milk powder that extends to the floor around it. Later, when walking up the stairs, I encounter Rihimäki’s other work, Mrs. Vice Versa, 2025 from her Matches, 2025-2026 series. These enlarged matchsticks are made up of bubble wrap, fur coat hooks and swimming caps, resembling bodies. What connects these works is this relationship between human and object: Rihimäki links these objects not only to human bodies, but to their absence too, staging domestic objects that imply a body.
Working with found materials and giving them new contexts seems central to several artists in Constant Ballads. Oscar Morel works with clothes gifted and gathered from people he knows, scraps, swatches from painters, foam and plaster. He layers these into installations, collages and spatial structures. Oftentimes he creates scenes of familiar people, everyday lives from his Dominican community in the Bronx. In this exhibition these scenes are set against a backdrop of old New York postal chutes, grounding the works in a specific urban and communal history. These materials feel more connected to spatial and domestic memory, highlighting what remains of the mundane. Juliette Hengst also works with found and collected materials, reassembling them into new configurations. For Hengst, the focus seems less on the memory these materials hold and more what they reveal under examination. Throughout the room are casts of animals, modelled figures, an old catalogue of a previous edition of Offspring preserved in a jar, metal legs holding lightbulbs filled with liquid, disassembled monitors arranged in the shape of a horse, and small pig figures open in the belly with candy eyes inside. The Offspring catalogue is a clear example, it is taken apart and examined, but then preserved and reintroduced into the exhibition, recontextualized in the very context it documents.
Tosca Monteyne’s The Pink Drawings, 2025-2026, made with ballpoint pen and collage on pink A4 paper, cover an entire room in the mezzanine. This work mixes spontaneity and deliberate order, because Monteyne uses words she heard randomly, on the radio, but arranges them in conscious sequence within the space. Here, recontextualization comes in the form of language itself: simple words, stripped of their original context, placed next to each other to create new meaning, particularly in an exhibition setting.
Going up the stairs to the first floor, passing by Rihimäki’s matches, I arrive at Yingfei Lyu’s room. Intergenerational memory and material intersect in this room, as most of the fabrics were hand woven by people from villages in Shandong, later dyed by Lyu and her mother, using natural materials, while the threads themselves were hand spun by Lyu’s great aunt. These materials are then combined with 3D prints and laser cut acrylic sheets into installations, making the space feel like an archaeological site crossed with a laboratory. Despite their differences in origin and method of production, these materials come together in a surprisingly cohesive visual language.
The two video works of Aiganym Mukhamejan, I Used to Wish for Thunder So We Could All Sleep in Her Bed, 2026 and Kündelık.Amsterdam, 2026 are both set in a somewhat domestic interior. The first in a closet space, with Mukhamejan’s grandmother’s dresses hanging at the entrance, and the latter accompanied by a vitrine full of small objects – flowers, candles, frames, and religious objects – almost like a shrine. Mukhamejan works with the aesthetics of mass produced objects, referencing both bazaars from Central Asia and markets here in the Netherlands. In Kündelık.Amsterdam, this consumerist visual language exists alongside something more ritualistic, as we watch the vlog style video from a couch, while these small, almost sacred objects sit behind the glass. By placing consumer culture and ritual aesthetics side by side, Mukhamejan blurs the distinctions between the two.
Reading the exhibition at first seems a bit overwhelming, partly because of the building and because the rooms dedicated to each artist are spread across the space. There is a guide, as well as bells that are meant to help visitors navigate, though even with that, finding your way can be difficult. This reflects the exhibition itself which brings together artists working with different materials, stories and visual languages. As I spend more time with the works, certain connections appear. Found materials are transformed, familiar objects take on new meaning and traditional techniques are placed alongside contemporary ones. Yet the exhibition never fully settles into one narrative, instead, it leaves space for these different approaches to stand on their own.
Offspring, De ATeliers, t/m 14.6.2026
Rebeka Erdélyi
is an Amsterdam-based art historian and curator whose current research focuses on post-socialist memory, nostalgia, and the (re)positioning of Central and Eastern European art in an international context.
