Friends Only is an interactive exhibition with more than forty international artists presenting the visual and performative aspects of contemporary virtual culture and its connection to the physical world.

About Friends Only:

As an unofficial shadow program of the Amsterdam Art Weekend we introduce a new exhibition platform. An immersive viewing experience that uses the internet as a host for artworks that become accessible through a physical space.

Vriend van Bavink pacific place is turned into a surrealistic labyrinth with visual cues, where you are challenged - with your own smartphone - to actively discover, scan, click and connect between the works, the makers and their themes.

The project aims to explore how art practices interpret the current condition of dissolving divisions between object and subject, fantasy and reality, nature and culture, to conceptions of the world as a collective process. Within this context, Oscar Wilde’s term “life imitates art” can be switched around into “art imitates life”. By doing this, it tears away the masks of aesthetics and culture placed over our suffocating artificial world, where the virtual threatens to displace the real.

The artists are selected based on their critical approach towards a contemporary post-reality internet lifestyle. They address the obscurity of technology-mediated relationships and their influence on identity, visual culture, and social interaction. By recognizing the world as a plurality of conditions and positions - and thereby rejecting dystopian and utopian views of modernity - they defy the limitations we have created ourselves.

Often created without the traditional systems of art world distribution or exhibition in mind, these works find a platform at Friends Only to be able to look beyond the walls of a gallery and move art into the dynamic realm of mobility, interaction, and global connectivity.

Artist in the show:

Aaajiao, Bora Akinciturk, Andrey Bogush, Jennifer Chan, Mark Callahan, Petra Cortright, Design Displacement Group, Heather Dewey-Hagborg, Maria Forqué / beta_0♥, Wassily Franco, Michele Gabriele, Emilie Gervais, Shawné Michaelin Holloway, Cyanne van den Houten, Lin Ke, Will Kendrick, Jacob Kok, Rachel Maclean, Lawn Mall, Jillian Mayer, Shawn Maximo, Vince Mckelvie, Rosa Menkman, Maria Metsalu, Brenna Murphy, Simone C. Niquille, Aapo Nikkanen, Pakui Hardware, Peekasso, Signe Pierce, Luca Pozzi, Geoffrey Pugen, Anna Reutinger, Sam Rolfes, Lisette Ros, Jeremy Rotsztain, Ryder Ripps, Molly Soda, Rustan Söderling, thereisamajorprobleminaustralia, Nora Turato, May Waver & Benedikt Woeppel