“SHaking, TuMbling, and tHe Little MistaKes We MaKe AloNg the Way”

19 April – 24 May 2025

Shaking, Tumbling, And the Little Mistakes We Make Along the Way

Featuring work by Kamilė Česnavičiūtė, Koen Kievits, George Kratochvil, Olivia Niuman, Simon Scharinger, Lambertine van Veldhuizen, Arjun Viir Bhandari, Sam Werkhoven, and Taco Yutong Huo.

Act I Opening: Friday 25 April at 17.00 hrs

Act I Exhibition period: 25 April – 4 May

Act II Opening: Saturday 10 May at 17.00 hrs

Act II Exhibition period: 10 May -18 May

Act III: Finissage Saturday 24 May at 17.00 hrs

Shaking, Tumbling, And All the Little Mistakes We Make Along the Way is an exhibition in three acts featuring the work of nine visual artists: Kamilė Česnavičiūtė, Koen Kievits, George Kratochvil, Olivia Niuman, Simon Scharinger, Lambertine van Veldhuizen, Arjun Viir Bhandari, Sam Werkhoven, and Taco Yutong Huo. The title reflects the instability and uncertainty that we encounter while trying to position ourselves in constantly changing contexts. This state of flux – and as result the persistent need to readjust, reposition, and reimagine – is a reality of our lives as artists and something we all relate to, despite the differences in the content of our work.

Over the course of a month, SIGN project space will become our sandbox to experiment with modes of presentation, display, and contextualization. The exhibition will open with paintings and drawings shown in the most ideal way possible within the project space. After two weeks, to create a second act, the work on show and their configuration will be changed as we respond to the idea of cocooning, protecting, and preserving. Finally, the exhibition will end with a short third act that highlights the inevitable miscommunications, conflicts, and mistakes we make along the way.

The transition between acts is marked by an event that resembles traditional exhibition events – an opening reception for Act I, an artist talk for Act II, and a finissage for Act III – but each one will have a twist related to the conceptual focus of each act. There will also be appearances by guest artists over the course of the exhibition period.

For the first act, each artist responds to the notion of the ideal. Physically, the work in this act is arranged as an intuitive response to the space available to us at SIGN. Implicit is the notion that the ideal is always at odds with contextual factors; while none of us know what exactly the ideal is or how it can be represented, this act enfolds the conscious act of trying to achieve it anyways.

The second act further reinforces the ultimate physicality of the work that we create. Curated around the notion of wrapping, storing, conserving and cocooning, the show for these two weeks envelops itself, providing a space for us to meditate on what it means to protect an artwork, either physically or conceptually.

Due to the three act structure and our commitment to adapting to the space, there is an element of the unknown that underlies the whole exhibition. The final act brings this into full focus, as it foregrounds the chaotic, unpredictable, and messy nature of our artistic practices. In this act, there is no central curation, and each artist selects the work they want to show or a performance to stage without communicating with the others. The lack of communication and conflicts that will occur will highlight the inevitable difficulties and competing visions that arise when working together as a group.

The conceptual focus of the three acts allows us to respond to the themes that unite us as visual artists – ideal viewing conditions, packing or storing, and communication (or lack thereof) – while also leaving room for us to maintain our individual voices as artists by giving us the space to position ourselves within the set framework.

A publication will also be made available to collect in sections throughout the course of the exhibition. Each artist has prepared responses in print format that correspond to the conceptual focus of the three acts. The publication itself is designed to physically expand to accommodate the additions from Act II and Act III that will be made available at the event for each act.

Text by Olivia Niuman

Artist Statements

Kamilė Česnavičiūtė

Through experiencing and observing the precariousness of our world, I respond by painting its inherent ambiguities. My narratives are inspired by reality but are transformed through the distortion of color and form. I am drawn to exploring the human condition through the lens of struggle, disconnection, futility and a longing for synergy. Working with thin layers of paint, I focus on the surface of the painting to reconstruct familiar scenes, turning everyday imagery into a bare, intense, and outside of time visual reaction – an ambiguous world open to interpretation. Through painting I grapple with our existence, how we interact, and how we create the world around us.

Koen Kievits

Koen Kievits (b. 1996 NL) works at the intersection of construction and deconstruction, treating his practice as a process of fragmentation and revelation. Kievits makes paintings, photographic works and installations whereby he places the removal or destruction of material at the forefront. The images and subjects in his works originate from magical childhood memories of a place in France, where the artist developed his fascination for nature, time and transience. A romantic sentiment is found throughout his line of works, but this melancholic feeling is often refuted by a more sober realistic glance at things.

George Kratochvil

In George Kratochvil’s pencil drawings, strange events transpire on a purgatorial nudist beach. Derived from the artist’s own neurotic preoccupations with sex, death and other people’s strained pineapples, the artist depicts scenes of unsettling stillness, with rigid bodies casting dark shadows over tranquil beaches. Every element of Kratochvil’s pictures is drawn from the artist’s imagination, and is the result of much anally retentive adjustment and experimentation over many preparatory sketches.

Olivia Niuman

Olivia Niuman (b. 2000, New Jersey, USA) is a Dutch-American artist who uses abstraction as a method for interpreting and communicating fragments from the world that strike her as meaningful. Her compositions begin with compelling visual elements drawn from her own archive of images – a shape formed by two buildings that almost touch, a glint of sunlight off of a window, or the gradual slope of a mountain – that are then abstracted and iterated upon through a dialogue with the painting. The challenge of creating a visually compelling image is integral to her process; the final work is a result of a delicate balance between deliberate formal decision-making informed by her background in art history and moments of intuition guided by her sensitivity to the materiality of paint.

Simon Scharinger

Simon Scharinger’s process gives form to that which hides in plain sight, oscillating between revelation and denial. His expressions are formed through immediacy, transforming the inside out—no obscuration—to surpass this swallowing, silencing mode of deflection. Simon Scharinger understands the canvas as a filter that absorbs, a web that traps what otherwise passes through. What remains is a remembrance of what cannot be ignored, should not be avoided and must not be denied. The gestures are concentrated into (re)marks—imprints like scars left behind on the canvas—a reverent to themselves, by themselves, for themselves, of themselves and in themselves.

Lambertine van Veldhuizen

I wanted to be a poet, but became a painter.
My practice moves between image, language, and space. I have a deep interest in what it means to be in-between. Themes like borders, suffocation, and thresholds often surface in my work. “Written language is a sequence of signs expanding within space; the reading of which occurs in time.”  Ulises Carrión, The New Art of Making Books. I try to approach painting with a similar logic; where visual language unfolds in space, on a canvas, and meaning emerges through rhythm, layering, and encounter. For me, painting is a way of thinking — a space where ideas, thoughts, and daily encounters meet.

Arjun Viir Bhandari

Arjun is an artist from India, based in the Netherlands. His work primarily revolves around the concepts of art, creativity, and their relation to metaphysics and mysticism. In his work, he attempts to reconcile Eastern and Western ideas and aesthetics, firmly believing that nothing is mutually exclusive and that all things exist in a kind of natural order he calls ‘cosmic chaos.’ This cosmic chaos is a precarious balance of coincidence and control. Arjun approaches his work as a spiritual and meditative process akin to yoga. Walking the tightrope of control and coincidence, he likes to work without limitations and boundaries, except for those that naturally present themselves.

Sam Werkhoven

Sam Werkhoven (b. 1997, Utrecht, NL) is a Dutch artist whose work explores the tension between contemporary and traditional attitudes surrounding image-making. His motifs arise from what he observes in his everyday life; through painting, he translates what catches his attention in his immediate environment, film stills and elements from Western art history. Werkhoven casts a magnifying glass on his surroundings, capturing and presenting a poetic sensibility for the appearance of things, and in sharing his work he invites viewers to do the same.

Taco Yutong Huo

My work lives in oscillation—between form and fracture, figuration and abstraction. Layers of line and color build unstable harmonies, echoing how we cling to structures yet strain against them. I trace recurring rhythms—waves, cycles, echoes—not as fixed symbols, but as fleeting negotiations between presence and dissolution. The tension interests me most: that fragile moment when meaning holds, then slips. I don’t seek resolution, only the charged space between knowing and un-knowing, where certainty trembles. Here, in the wobble of being, the work breathes.