Tickets via Perdu

Curated by Titus Nouwens (Prelude) and hosted by Marija Cetinić and Lorenzo Andrade-Garcia (Perdu)

Majestic Casual –– Profumo Affair: Billy Morgan meets Sands Murray (Educational Anti-Entertainment) is a collaboration between artists Billy Morgan and Sands Murray-Wassink and Titus Nouwens. It marks the first public outcome of Prelude, a series of live events emphasising interconnections and influences between moving image and performance, and between visual artists of distinct generations.

Billy Morgan was born in London in 1994, when Sands Murray-Wassink was a student at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn with artist Carolee Schneemann. Both artists eventually found their way to Amsterdam to continue their education in art. Sands’ former teacher, Carolee, became his role model, collaborator and friend, while Sands himself emerged as an important voice within Amsterdam’s artistic community. In recent years, his emphasis on the influences, friendships and other relationships that inform his work––and its use of his body, thoughts, feelings, emotions, and behavior as art materials––inspires a young generation of artists and curators internationally. “Sharing information as if it were a brushstroke, which it is,” he writes. In the spirit of such intergenerational exchange, Titus Nouwens brings together the work of Sands and Billy in a sort of extended blind date.

Language connects their two bodies of work. Language and embodiment. “Language is somehow the basis of art, no matter how it is spoken, written, recorded, used. It is a form of communication surpassing the visual, it comes from the body, relates to it, and the success of artists has mainly to do with how they talk about and frame their works with language” Sands writes to Billy. “What I love in the world is its associative nature – that things and feelings remind me of other things and feelings, that these can be captured by words” writes Billy to Sands. The artists’ associative and analytical thinking expresses itself in precise yet uncomplicated language, full of humor and feeling. Sands through text-paintings characterised by honesty. Billy through texts that they activate with voice and movement; texts that play with fictionality and activate the audience's imagination.

During the evening at Perdu, Sands and Billy embody each other’s language and show each other “how it’s done.” The program brings together materials and texts produced and gathered over the past months through an email correspondence. These include fragments of works by older generations of female artists from the US and Poland – Adrian Piper, Carolee Schneemann, Hannah Wilke and Małga Kubiak – that have been foundational to Sands and Billy respectively.

Using video projections, music, text recitation and interaction, Sands and Billy uncover a budding relationship and build bridges based on the idea that education is possible in all directions and at all stages of life. In this highly experimental program, Sands and Billy present something transformative for both themselves and the audience who complete the work.

About the artists:

Sands Murray-Wassink was born 17 March, 1974 in Topeka, Kansas, USA and lives and works in Amsterdam since 1994. He is a painter, body artist, writer, perfume collector indebted to various forms and permutations of intersectional feminist and queer art. He is bipolar and his career has been marked by exclusion. Influences such as Carolee Schneemann, Hannah Wilke, and Adrian Piper serve as foundational coordinates for his practice. Lived experience is paramount, as “the personal is political” and urgent for all in our world. Recent solo presentations were realised with Auto Italia, London; Le Confort Moderne, Poitiers; diez gallery and If I Can’t Dance, Amsterdam. All pertinent information about his work and trajectory can be found on internet and on the website.

Billy Morgan was born on the 23 February, 1994 and grew up in London, UK. Their turn towards art-making took place during the two years that they lived in Warsaw, from 2018 to 2020. This was a formative period of change, learning, resistance and relations. From their beginnings in poetry-writing, and influenced by their friendships and collaborations, they have built a practice structured around language and embodiment. They continue to narrate a splitness inherent to their experience, with a light disregard for medium. Recent solo presentations were realised with ICA, London; ROZENSTRAAT, Amsterdam; marytwo, Luzern and Les Urbaines, Lausanne. Website of the artist.

Tickets via de Brakke Grond

Curated by Titus Nouwens (Prelude)



A voice weaves through a collection of images; somewhere between memory and imagination a story emerges. For this edition of Prelude, artists Pedro Barateiro and Agnieszka Polska bring their video work to the theatre – and with it their worlds, their language, their ways of seeing and thinking. The World As You Know It is an evening on the frontier between what we know and what we can imagine, between personal and collective memories, between fiction and reality. The evening is part of Prelude: a series of live programmes focusing on the interplay between performance, moving image and collective experience, with the theatre acting as a space for time-based visual art.

Pedro Barateiro's Love Song (2024) is a film-performance full of echoes: of his teenage years, of encyclopaedias and the internet, of letters between his parents during Portuguese fascism. And of a love song that played on the radio one night in 1974, starting the Carnation Revolution – a shift from authoritarianism towards democracy. The film moves between the personal and the political, between poetry and protest, technology and tenderness, autobiography and autofiction. Between a painting made at the height of German Romanticism, a time of industrialisation, and the artificial Love Lake in a Dubai desert, Barateiro asks the question: how deep is neoliberalism embedded in our imagination? And how is the word “love” used, misused, and appropriated?

During this evening, Love Song will be accompanied live by artist Lou Vives (voice/performance) and musician Frederik Daelemans (cello/electronics).

Agnieszka Polska approaches language as fundamentally shaping and defining both our communication and our imagination. In Watery Rhymes (2014), language is driven by the same forces and rules as physics, representing the universe as a space that exists only insofar as it can be described in words. Her more recent film The Book of Flowers (2023) depicts an alternative evolution in which humans and plants live in symbiosis for centuries. A voice from another world narrates this history with such obvious authority that it slowly settles into our own frame of reference. The video ends with the question: ‘what if, at some point, human technology is able to tell our story better than we can?’

Perhaps that is the core of Barateiro and Polska's work: that stories become real once we take them seriously. Together, they bring imaginative voices that use language and narrative not to describe the world, but to rethink it – with images, with words, with each other.

About the artists:

Pedro Barateiro (b. 1979, Almada) is an artist based in Lisbon. He works with sculpture, film, performance, writing and drawing. Barateiro explores how what happens around us is influenced by fictional narratives, and how these narratives shape our perception and can be used as a strategy for social and personal reflection. His work has been shown among others at P///AKT in Amsterdam; NW, Open Huis voor Hedendaagse Kunst en Film in Aalst; M HKA in Antwerp; Kunsthalle Lissabon and Galeria Filomena Soares in Lisbon; Batalha Centro de Cinema in Porto; Kunsthalle Basel; and the biennials of Berlin, Havana, São Paulo, Sharjah and Sydney.

Agnieszka Polska (b. 1985, Lublin) is a video artist based in Berlin. Polska translates the ethical and social challenges of our time into immersive, meditative films and installations, using cinematic narratives and affective technologies to address the ongoing negotiation between humans and technology. Polska's films make us reflect on language, history and science and activate a critical awareness of our social and individual responsibility in a ‘post-truth world’. Her work has been shown at the New Museum and MoMA in New York; Centre Pompidou and Palais de Tokyo in Paris; Tate Modern in London; Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin; and M HKA in Antwerp. She also participated in the biennials of Gwangju, Istanbul, Shanghai, Sydney and Venice. In 2018, Polska received the German Preis der Nationalgalerie. Polska was a resident at Rijksakademie in 2014-2015.

Lou Vives (b. 1999, Lisbon) is an Amsterdam-based artist with a performance practice in which repetition functions as a form of translation. These performances use the codes of music to reflect on transience and resilience as tools to move through contemporary life. Vives' work is an attempt at remembering - a process the artist describes as ’recognising that my life was lived by many people.’ Vives' work has been shown at Kunsthalle Lissabon and Galeria Zé dos Bois in Lisbon; La Casa Encendida and Matadero in Madrid; Woonhuis de Ateliers and Perdu (Voice as Landscape) in Amsterdam. Vives publishes in the Netherlands-based art criticism platform Tangents.

Frederik Daelemans (b. 2001, Duffel) is a musician-producer based in Brussels, trained as a classical cellist. He is known for his dynamic contributions both live and in the studio with acclaimed artists such as Tamino, Beirut and Meskerem Mees. In addition, Daelemans is also on stage with his own musical project, the experimental band Cesar Quinn. He is now embarking on a new solo venture, mixing his vocals with the atmospheric sounds of his cello, enhanced by effects pedals. Daelemans has also collaborated with several artists as a record producer and songwriter.