It’s Never “Just Hair” – Avantika Tibrewala (winner public vote)

Meet the Chudail — the femme fatale they warned you about. Too, too much. Her hair flows wild over the boxes our society stands on — neat, polished confines of obedience. A Collective farewell to the decaying ideologies that taught us to discipline ourselves with combs and braid away our natural ferocity. She’s cutting through them all. Bye-Bye.

A love letter to rage and reclamation, to women who’s hair refuses to behave. This Chudail isn’t hiding. She’s spinning and laughing over the ruins of what doesn’t serve anymore. Her Mumma’s question — “What did you do to your hair?” — passed down like an heirloom, lives in every strand she refuses to tame. Colonial hangovers? Snipped. Patriarchal combs? Snapped. Monstrous or divine? You decide — but whatever you do, vote for her before she haunts your dreams.

Poster design by Ramsha Qamar.

About the Artist:
Avantika Tibrewala is an Indian-born performance artist and maker. Based in Amsterdam, Tibrewala moves between live performance—encompassing dance theatre—and documentary interviews, placing the body at the center as both a subject and a site of meaning-making. Driven by an exploration of human behaviour, her works engage with themes of social normativity and the politics of the unspoken. She is interested in presenting the investigation of her curiosities to the public rather than asserting fixed narratives. An interplay between intimate, provocative and thought-provoking, her work reimagines the relationship between the audience and the stage. Her artistic stimulus is rooted in her country’s ever-changing landscape, colours, rituals and the Indian cinema providing the spectator with multiple elements and constant shifts during the performance – an aesthetic strategy responding critically to the accelerated attention economy of contemporary spectatorship.

Under The Table – Karina Puuffin

Under the Table is a participatory installation and performance inspired by Puuffin’s childhood memory of hiding under the table in her Ukrainian home and drawing on the wallpaper. The work features a whimsical wooden house with a single wallpapered wall, imitating a living room, where visitors are invited to draw or write memories of their childhood homes. Each day, four singers perform a short choral piece composed from these contributions, turning personal memories into a living, evolving symphony. The project transforms a private, nostalgic moment into a shared act of creativity and remembrance, exploring themes of belonging, displacement, and resilience.

About the artist:
Karina Puuffin’s (1997, Ukraine) work occupies a mischievous space between critique and celebration. She likes to transform painting into a spatial, performative act: one that doesn’t sit politely on the wall but spills, stretches, and leans into the viewer’s space. Her work stems from a personal and political impulse to unframe art—literally and ideologically. Beneath its childlike clarity and comics stylisation lies a sharp interrogation of systems: artistic, institutional, and ideological. Her practice questions who gets to define what art is, how it should behave, and where it belongs. She tries to reclaim messiness, softness, and exaggeration as modes of resistance, where clumsiness is intentional, joy is a strategy, and painting is something to walk into, question, and laugh with.

Puuffin graduated from Minerva Art Academy in Groningen with exceptional grades in 2020. She was part of various exhibitions in the Netherlands such as Best of Graduates in Gallery Ron Mandos (Amsterdam), Museum EICAS (Deventer) and Prospects (ART Rotterdam, Ahoy). She also received a Mondriaan Artist Start Grant in 2023.

(يالله تنام) Yalla Tnam – Rebecca Lillich // Krüger & Ahmad Mallah

Yalla Tnam (يالله تنام) is a ritual performance — a composed echo of grief, protest, and survival. Through voice, sound, and movement, artists Ahmad Mallah and Rebecca Lillich // Krüger invite the audience to witness an act of collective mourning and rebirth. The performance interweaves Fairuz’s lullaby “Yalla Tnam” with Syrian grief rituals that emerged during the early years of the Syrian Revolution— Mallah’s singing, processed live through a vocal processor, becomes a haunting rhythm of care and endurance. Lillich // Krüger responds with embodied gestures of care + violence, crafting a mythic performance that evokes both tenderness and tension.

Yalla Tnam unfolds as a ceremony — a poetic moment suspended between the personal and the political. It explores the artists intertwined heritages, migration histories, and their complex relationship to the Netherlands, a place of both refuge and displacement.

About the Artists:
Ahmad Mallah & Rebecca Lillich // Krüger are an Amsterdam based performance duo intersecting the personal and political, performing open symbols to generate reflection, introspection and connection.
Their debut works The Ladder (2023) and The Price of Bricks (2024) utilize singular objects through multiple mediums as action-based performance art happenings. Their new works, pulling blood from stone (2025) and work in progress Yalla Tnam (2025-), dive into surrealism and hypernormativity through song, gesture and costume as an evolution of their process. The duo has performed at Oerol Festival (Terschelling NL,) Stedelijk Museum (Amsterdam NL,) Sismográf Festival (Olot, ES), Stadsschouwburg Utrecht (Utrecht NL) and Van Gogh Museum (Amsterdam NL) to name a selection and have just presented their first duo exhibition and full length performance work after a residency with Nieuwe Vide (Haarlem NL.)

Cantes de ida (Heenreis liedjes / One-way songs) – Guillermo Martín Viana

Where do we belong to if we are constructing our own identity? What are the songs, gestures, and stories we carry with us when we are elsewhere? What if home is not a place, but a practice of care in motion? Which new roots can hold us as we move?

Cantes de ida stems from community art as healing practice, and unfolds as a living, breathing encounter between people, memory, sound and movement. It begins as a nomadic, participatory installation — a shelter in motion — where people are invited to share fragments of their own lived experiences regarding migration, fugitivity and being elsewhere. These contributions, translated into embodied gestures and sounds, become the seed for interdisciplinary improv-based performances combining drums, voice, dance and pre-recorded media; a scenic piece that, like micelium, weaves together and nourishes our different roots — a collective act of remembering, listening, and belonging.

About the artist:
Guillermo Martín-Viana is a visual artist, creative coder, drummer, and improviser working across disciplines that range from traditional performing arts to interactive new-media technologies. His most recent multimedia works are based on the development of interactive generative visual systems with various forms of audience participation. His latest album, ‘Songs of Rage and Impotence – 1LL0~Remixes’ was released last year on Oigovisiones Label.

To My Celestial – Quan Nguyen

To‍‌‍‍‌‍‌‍‍‌ My Celestial is a multimedia installation that presents a speculative altar inspired by Vietnamese ancestor worship.
This work grows from my experience of migration and separation as I search for ways to reconnect with my cultural roots in a foreign world. In Vietnamese ideology, the family altar is a spiritual gate between the living and the ancestors above. Traditionally, by burning elaborate paper objects and performing monthly rituals, people express their wish that these offerings will materialize in the afterlife. Yet the younger generations raised in modern environments are less likely to continue these traditions.

Through a combination of physical installation and a video-based work, To My Celestial questions the spiritual practices if they are mediated by cameras, software, and media. It does not reproduce ritual in an ethnographic way, but rather constructs an imagined environment in which contact with “home” or my afterlife becomes possible through technological means. The installation is a mixture of low-tech craft and digital tools, reflects the coexistence of tradition and modernity in a society that is characterized by speed and ‍‌‍‍‌‍‌‍‍‌change.

About the artist:
Quân is a visual artist based in Rotterdam. His practice develops transdisciplinary art concepts at the intersection of digital media, print matter, motion graphics and photography.

Growing up in Huế, Quân has nurtured a deep appreciation for Vietnamese traditions, as it closely intertwines with his art and design practice abroad. His work reflects themes of diaspora, identity and topophilia, challenging how culture and traditions continue to engage with the zeitgeist.