UTRECHT.- Casco Art Institute: Working for the Commons presents the 2026 Spring Program, move not for reason but love, featuring three distinct exhibitions by Winnie Herbstein, Avan Omar, and Ama Josephine Budge.
Singular in voice, language, and commitment, the proposals converge around shared concerns with historical erasure, the politics of representation, and archival silence, while pursuing an imaginative exploration of embodied living memory as a counter-archive of history.
Inseparable from this process is the experience of being moved: what draws us toward the familiar and distances us from the unfamiliar. How do we unsettle what has come to feel “given” within dominant knowledge systems, and how might we both hold space for and be/hold those stories and experiences confined to the margins of history?
Across the three projects, the artists work with embodied, enacted, and ephemeral strategies of remembrance, each navigating the question of how to sustain memories, stories, and cultural narratives that resist dominant written, recorded, or archival accounts.
Spanning video, sculpture, architecture, photography, and drawing, Herbstein, Omar, and Budge engage performative, spatial, and documentary approaches that materialize memory in the present—re-centering and revitalizing what has been eroded or lost.
By gently shifting the gaze, their proposals encourage new ways of relating, listening, and feeling, while also recognizing that some experiences resist easy explanation or full understanding. Alongside this, the projects activate modes of historical imagination beyond fixed narratives or singular truths.
The title move not for reason but love is drawn from a line by poet Aja Monet. With love as the pulse through which living histories are newly felt, it names what moves the artists—care, responsibility, and justice—while inviting attunement to affective registers that open new ways of engaging with them.
Winnie Herbstein presents We need to speak about living room, a new co-commissioned project examining community-led housing experiments in the Netherlands, unfolding across Kunsthuis SYB in Beesterzwaag and Casco Art Institute in Utrecht. Bringing together film, architectural installation, archival research, and participatory methods drawn from family constellation therapy, Herbstein explores how shared ideals of collective living are formed and sustained, while attending to the tensions, conflicts, and emotional complexities that often resist documentation. The project asks how communal histories are shaped not only by what is recorded and preserved, but also by what remains unresolved, unspoken, or difficult to contain within conventional archival frameworks.
Avan Omar presents Zero Art, a multidisciplinary installation documenting how political upheaval and social transformation in South Kurdistan between 1990 and 2010 shaped artistic production and cultural memory. Omar’s exhibition features documentary film, podcasts, interviews, archival materials, and visual artworks—including her own works and those of fellow Kurdish contemporary artists. The project situates personal narratives alongside historical events such as the Gulf War, uprisings, displacement, and migration, while critically reflecting on how art responds to conflict, loss, resilience, and identity. Through interactive formats such as an open archive room, listening stations, and collaborative mapping, visitors are invited to contribute their own reflections and experiences, transforming the exhibition into an evolving platform of storytelling. Blending academic research with lived memory and artistic practice, Omar’s work activates the archive as a dynamic site of historical reimagining, dialogue, and communal knowledge-making.
Ama Josephine Budge develops A Voyeur at the Keyhole, a multi-part installation exploring Blackness, mixed race identity, queerness, fatness, and motherhood, and how these lived positions both exceed and are constrained by dominant categories of belonging. Through hollowed, unfired clay bodies punctured by keyholes, Budge reveals intimate film sequences of family rituals and journeys between Ghana and the Atlantic. Market sourced mirrors referencing colonial beauty regimes reflect viewers into their own gaze, while sculpted seating formed with fat queer collaborators and family photographs transform the gallery into a domestic and ritual space shaped by ancestry and memory. The work creates a site of opacity and pleasure where Black futures emerge through care, intimacy, and embodied continuity rather than historical erasure.
