Sustaining the Otherwise:
Practicing Freedom and Refusal
Join us for the opening reception of Sustaining the Otherwise: Practicing Freedom and Refusal on Friday, February 27th 2026, from 6pm at Metro54.
We’ll open with an activation by one of the exhibiting artists: AYO, ‘A score for Atat’s homestead’ followed by an introduction from curators Amal Alhaag and Selene Wendt.
Join us to celebrate, drinks and snacks will be provided!
We’re delighted to present an incredible array of works from artists Ayo, Masimba Hwati, Christian Nyampeta, Adeju Thompson and Helena Uambembe. The works are positioned as distinctly shaped by the nuances and complexities of the dual action of practicing freedom and refusal.
Initiated by curators Selene Wendt and Amal Alhaag, Sustaining the Otherwise is a collaborative research and artistic project which explores questions of restitution, reparation and transformation. Practicing Freedom and Refusal is part of the project’s multilocational artistic program, and actively engages with the topic of restitution by centralizing research-based artistic practices and lifeworlds that sit with the tensions of colonial terror and confront the (im)possibility of restitution, rematriation, and freedom.
🔥Date: Friday 27th February
🔥Time: 18:00 - 21:00
🔥Location: Westerdoksdijk 597,
🔥Please RSVP, link here
Christine ‘AYO’ is a Kampala-raised, Rotterdam-based multidisciplinary artist working across sculpture, sound, performance, and film. AYO approaches artist-hood as a daily process of plural world-building. Through time-based and collaborative works, AYO researches how intangible cultural heritage —including language, customs, indigenous knowledge, among others — can come into dialogue with material forms, shaping sites where histories are enlivened, shared, or misunderstood.
Helena Uambembe is a South African born artist, who lives and works in Berlin. Her multidisciplinary practice explores the intersections of personal and political histories, tracing the legacies of colonialism, conflict, and migration across Angola, South Africa, and beyond. Drawing on her family’s experience as part of the 32 Battalion of the South African Apartheid Army, Uambembe maps how intimate lives are shaped by broader historical forces.
Masimba Hwati works across sound, sculpture, and performance, tracing everyday acts of resistance, negotiation, and survival. Drawing on indigenous philosophies and sonic vibrational knowing, his practice treats sound not as accompaniment but as an active, emerging, and relational force—one that carries memory, conflict, and ancestral continuities across time and place.
Christian Nyampeta is an artist living in New York from where he organizes programs, exhibitions, screenings, performances, and publications, which are conceived as hosting structures for collective feeling, cooperative thinking, and mutual action.
Adeju Thompson is a Nigerian designer and multidisciplinary artist working across fashion, textiles, film, and research. Their practice examines African histories, aesthetics, gender, and futurity, with a focus on how Indigenous knowledge systems can be carried forward rather than flattened or aestheticized.
Sustaining the Otherwise is a multi-locational research and artistic project about restitution, reparation and transformation that offers a space for artists, curators, and scholars to be in dialogue and to explore the topic of restitution in relation to both material and immaterial culture, and an opportunity to exchange knowledge and to expand upon existing networks. Focusing on artistic practices, from February 2026 until Summer 2027, the 2026/2027 program features a multilocational exhibition and artistic program,includes gatherings, artistic programming, exhibitions, artist publications, residencies, publications and the creation of an accessible online and physical archive. Throughout the program and its afterlife, we will present a series of program threads that are organized alongside guided by themes including such as the Earth as a Wayfinder, Becoming at One with the World, Unruly Knowledge, and Transformative Ecosystems in Practice. Each program focuses on a particular set of questions and concepts that offer imaginative, artistic, and community-based ways approaches thatto stretch the notion of restitution beyond the cultural heritage object by centering the artistic practices, community work, research and imagination that is necessary as we seek to also foreground the importance of epistemic restitution.