Conditional Air Variations
Presentation by Anne Jan Reijn
Opening on Friday October from 17:00 - 20:00
Schaafstraat 10 — Amsterdam
Oct 16 - Nov 8
Only open every sat & sun from 14:00 - 18:00
Gallery van Fanny Freytag is pleased to announce that Anne-Jan Reijn will be taking over the gallery space from October 16 until November 8 with an opening on October 16, from 17:00 until 20:00. In this period, Anne Jan Reijn takes over the gallery space, creating an experience in which air assumes a central role. We would like to inform you, as we believe it will be an exceptional presentation.
The work by Reijn has a strong performative character and challenges the visitor to step out of their comfort zone. His work is rooted in an ongoing investigation of risk, instability, and the human desire for control.
Text by Anne-Jan Reijn
Air is respiration
Air is atmosphere
Air can throw you over or blow you up
Air permeates me
Permeates the tree
Air is our medium
We are like fish in the water in air
and sometimes like fish on the land
In the solo exhibition Conditional Air Variations Reijn is pulling air to the foreground, to experience it as intimacy, as being enveloped. Entering this art space means receiving air, means giving it back. Breathing and wading through, the forever respiratory gas exchange of humans, trees, a fly. Every breath made of all that lives and ever lived. Air is set in motion: air stumbling, tumbling - but also made suspect, visible, coloured, good, extravagant, erratic, continually on the verge of deprivation or deviation, contamination lingering.
Conditional Air carries two meanings, both of which the exhibition inhabits. Conditioned air is air that has been designed, measured and regulated and pumped and palpitated through the veins of our architecture to idyllically mix with our bodies. Each of us tweaking our own private micro bubble. Conditional air is air that can no longer be taken for granted, air that depends, that shifts, that could become something else entirely.
The exhibition comprises ceramic objects, a text, kinetic works, sculptures that shift and accumulate and a radical spatial intervention.
About the artist
Anne-Jan Reijn’s practice is rooted in an ongoing investigation of risk, instability, and the human desire for control. Balancing between conceptual art and performative installation, his practice places the audience in direct confrontation with unstable situations that test comfort and expectation. Through these charged encounters, Reijn transforms danger into both an aesthetic spatial experience and a form of social reflection.
Working across a wide range of media and materials, he constructs multi sensory installations that breathe, shift, and destabilize the boundaries between safety and threat. At the core of his practice lies a fascination with the Western denial of death and the cultural obsession with safety — a paradox where society seeks to eliminate danger while celebrating destruction through spectacle.
Combining real and imagined scenarios, Reijn uses both speculation and actual risk to expose the fragility of control and to question how we define safety, reality, and trust. His works reveal the subtle line between order and chaos, proposing alternative ways of relating to uncertainty — embracing dynamism, instability, and the inherently unstable.
Anne-Jan Reijn (1983, Amsterdam) studied electronic music at the HKU in Utrecht, fine arts at the UdK in Berlin and finished his Masters at the ArtScience faculty at the Royal Academy of Arts in The Hague and previously exhibited at Nieuw Dakota, Stichting NDSM, Vriend van Bavink, W139, Nuit Blanche Brussels and Gabriel