AMSTERDAM.- What is held in the ground is never singular. The soil holds what has been built and what has been undone. It carries gestures of care sedimented within violent histories. To approach the ground, here, is to approach a field of entanglement—a temporal convergence of soil, labour, and memory.
W139 announces flour, water, soil, its first artist-initiated exhibition of 2026. The group exhibition, initiated by maria khatchadourian, features three new site-specific works and three adapted works by Areej Ashhab, Common Ground, Ola Hassanain, maria khatchadourian, Ai Ozaki, and belit sağ.
Together, the works in the exhibition attend to soil, seed, water, fermentation, and ruin as sites where care and violence are entangled—holding stories of repair, dispossession, and continuity. The exhibition reflects on food, land, and agricultural practice as the infrastructures through which geographies of displacement, colonial rupture, and kinship are carried and contested—fragile geographies that resist erasure through dialect, embodied knowledge, and ancestral recipes.
The exhibition will be on show until July 12th and will also feature an extended community programme that unfolds through acts of gathering: conversations, reading sessions, workshops, shared meals, foraging, and collective actions that extend beyond the works themselves. Emerging as an exhibition continually in flux, flour, water, soil will expand through gestures that activate the space as a lived, living, and sustaining environment.
Participating Artists
Areej Ashhab (1995, Palestine) is an artist and researcher whose work addresses material heritage loss, more-than-human ecologies, and land politics. Areej’s practice spans material experimentation, writing, and film, and often unfolds collectively through walks, workshops, and shared meals. She is the co-founder of Al-Block, documenting lost narratives of the Palestinian landscape through collective walking, and Al-Wah’at, a translocal collective countering anthropocentric and colonial narratives around arid lands and futures.
Common Ground is a collaborative artistic project by Anna Celda (1996, Valencia) and Saja Amro (1993, Palestine). Using the dining table and kitchen as learning environments, their research projects delve into topics such as female labour, inherited knowledge, and food/famine as a tool for control.
Ola Hassanain (1985, Sudan) is an artist whose work moves through architecture, film, and spatial strategies to reflect on how power becomes visible, and felt, through built environments. Her practice engages with places shaped by climate instability, postcolonial legacies, and displacement, thinking through the politics of inhabiting and how ecological and social systems shape one another across time.
maria khatchadourian (1982, Lebanon) is an artist and cook currently based in Amsterdam. Her practice takes shape at the intersection of food and art, where inherited recipes, food imaginaries, and communal gestures of eating/cooking together become a gathering ground to unearth notions of home, exile, and split habitat.
Ai Ozaki (1991, Japan) is a visual artist whose practice explores how personal elements such as the body, experiences, and emotions can create connection and be shared with others. She investigates the ways that her body interacts with ‘the Other’—not only other people, but all living things, and even herself. In her practice she imagines forms of communication with these close, yet so far incomprehensible, beings and things.
belit sağ (1980, Turkey) is a visual artist, researcher, and educator. Her artistic practice is deeply rooted in long-term (archival) research with a particular focus on visual representations of structural violence, migration stories, and afterlives of images.
