‘Seamless Tissue Might Fray’
A group exhibition curated by Simone Iris de Haan
With:
Gegee Ayurzana, Tereza Sýkorová, Nadie Borggreve, Bregje Sliepenbeek, Anthony Ngoya and Neil Fortune
Seamless Tissue Might Fray opens on March 14, 17:00 at Gallery van Fanny Freytag and is on view until April 24.
Seamless Tissue Might Fray is a group exhibition that explores the ways in which contemporary artistic practices call upon the potency of textiles in pulling closer our memories faded by time, as well as historic realms of making. Serving as portals, textiles enable access to past practices and systems of knowledge, leading us to lived experiences and generational stories. Situated around the phenomenon of textiles as triggers of our previous perceptions, this group exhibition brings together artists who, through their practices, reactivate the material remnants of realities we’re close to losing grasp of. Carrying the textile tool into future spheres, these textile practices call upon our engagement with the ambiguous and the incommensurable, while their transience and fragility confronts us with finitude. Seamless Tissue Might Fray explores whether it might be this fragility of textiles that reconnects us with a state of vulnerability, and how we leave certain memories to perish when we cease continuations and reintegrations of matter and practice.
Nadie Borggreve and Bregje Sliepenbeek, Gates of Ancient Gardens, 2022. Dyed wool, latex, backing, and tin, approx. 45 x 30 cm, dimensions variable. Available separately, for inquiries click here
Nadie Borggreve's (1991, Amsterdam, Netherlands) tufted landscapes emerge from a deep fascination for serendipitous encounters with nature, her cyclical approach to treating nature’s elements both as material source and as an origin of her illusionary dreamscapes, where natural settings are at once distorted and enhanced by human perception. Sourced from stockpile textiles and worn garments, Borggreve’s hand dyed wool takes on a luminosity that defies the material’s inherent heavyweightedness when forcefully tufted. Unusually rich colors, obtained through her distinctive dyeing process, glow bright like skylit stained glass windows overlooking mesmerizing, fragmented fields. Borggreve’s works act as portals into spiritual and circular realms, where textiles become tools to explore our place among them.
Borggreve’s works Gates of Ancient Gardens (2023) were sculpted in collaboration with Bregje Sliepenbeek, whose practice is centred on metal, aluminum and tin sculpting––morphing rigid materials into fluid looking, at times cushionlike, tactile objects.
Nadie Borggreve studied at the Royal Academy of Art (KABK) in The Hague, where she won the department prize for Textile and Fashion (2016). Borggreve’s current studio practice evolved from fashion design towards an artistic practice where textiles extend into unexpected spheres, of which her ongoing experimental process forms an integral part.
Bregje Sliepenbeek received her BA in Edelsmeden (Jewelry) from the Gerrit Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam (2013).
Anthony Ngoya, Stele of a Memory 1, 2022, scanned photos transferred to repurposed linoleum panels on wood, acrylic, fringes, 105 x 60 cm.
Anthony Ngoya (1995, Limoges, France) reconstructs fragments of memory, emotion, and identity into vibrant sculptural installations that defy the boundaries of painting as a medium. By layering personal and collective imagery–ranging from personal and public photo archives to discarded urban scraps and construction debris–Ngoya’s works become bearers of intergenerational memory, both shared and personal. Strips of redyed textiles, imprinted with archival images through various printing techniques, evoke lingering feelings of nostalgia. Ngoya’s works stand as ruins of distant times, as he himself refers to them, our sentiments at once distorted and comforted by the interplay of the ambiguous and the familiar.
Anthony Ngoya obtained his MA in Painting from La Cambre in Brussels, Belgium (2020). From 2023 until 2024, Ngoya was an artist in residence at De Ateliers, Amsterdam.
Special thanks to Gallery Caroline O'Breen.
Neil Fortune, Seek and You Shall Find, 2023–2025 (Detail), silkscreen print on textile, threads, steel frame, 74 cm x 74 cm x 58 cm.
Neil Fortune’s (1983, Georgetown, Guyana) practice is driven by his urge to cultivate social interactions and oscillates between sculpture, drawing, painting and architectural interventions. Fortune utilizes textiles as recurring witnesses and documentary tools, carrying the traces of live encounters through drawings and doodles that emerge during his deeply personal conversations and performances with communities and occasional participants. Rooted in research, his work explores the material convergences and allures of the natural and the artificial. Fortune’s textile installation Seek And You Shall Find (2023–2025) reimagines material remnants through photography and silkscreen, mimicking laboratory studies of intricate organisms. Shards of glass are observed and treated as natural phenomena, their fragmented shapes rendered into countless variations, an orderly process of archiving and reorganising. Fortune treats discarded residues of consumption with respect and emotional care, imbuing them with an archeological status.
Neil Fortune was trained as a painter at the Nola Hatterman Art Academy in Paramaribo, Suriname, after which he obtained his BA in Fine Art at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam.
Tereza Sýkorová, When We Reach The Afterlife, Cotton, threads, wire, photo print, 170 x 62 cm
Tereza Sýkorová’s (1996, Vsetín, Czechia) sculptural objects are conceived of wrapped strands of reclaimed textiles, redyed and winded with colored threads into what she calls cocoons. Sýkorová’s works expand into spatial installations, often enhanced by sound, that magnify our interconnectedness to nature, bringing up feelings of rootedness to natural cycles and ancestral practices. She seeks to collaborate with these cycles, viewing life on earth as a non-hierarchical network of elements with which her textile practice confluences and interacts. Capturing these exchanges through photography, with water metaphorically infusing them with echoes of memory, decay, and rebirth, she reintegrates them into her pieces. Some of Sýkorová’s works draw on Slavic mythology, where wells symbolize portals into past realms, representing interconnected forms and periods of life.
Tereza Sýkorová holds an MA in Intermedia from the Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design in Prague, Czechia (2022).
Gegee Ayurzana, Illusions of itch, 2025 (Detail), Oil and EVA resin on sheer polyester, 110 x 115 cm.
Gegee Ayurzana (1998, Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia) paints presences that roam freely through spaces, carried by veils suspended above us––their transparency recentering brushstrokes, which emerge as subjects by themselves. Confronting the boundaries and conventional narratives of painting, Ayurzana experiments with unexpected material variations, reinviting them as bearers of her painted beings. She explores the unheeded abilities of textiles, wood, and foil, among other materials, to heighten our physical awareness of sharing presence and coinhabiting spaces with her pieces, which cut seamlessly across spatial surfaces.
Gegee Ayurzana holds a dual BA in Fine Arts from the Royal Academy of Art (KABK), The Hague and Art History from Leiden University (2021). From 2022 until 2023, Ayurzana was an artist in residence at De Ateliers, Amsterdam.