distant.gallery presents its first ever festival, in partnership with cultural institutions navigating the pressures of austerity, displacement, and precarity - realities they not only address but increasingly endure. Set against a shifting media landscape shaped by algorithmic amplification, social media virality, and the rise of populist and fascist ideologies, the festival interrogates the role of culture in an age of blurred realities and politicized information.
Through exhibitions, public dialogues, and community-led initiatives, the program highlights how institutions and artists alike strive to sustain cultural expression amid unstable infrastructures and contested narratives. It asks how identity, memory, and tradition can persist - and evolve - when both the physical and digital realms are co-opted, collapsed, or rendered hyperreal. This festival is a call to examine not just what we preserve, but how we continue to do so under intensifying socio-political and economic strain.
With: Andariya, Archive of Silence, De Balie, Gray Area, the Internet Archive, Khartoon Magazine, Kunstlicht, Medrar, Munyu, Tarkib, Untitled Tbilisi and Witte Rook
Easy! When it’s time for the event you would like to attend, simply go to this website.
For the smoothest experience, we recommend joining via Chrome with headphones - this prevents audio feedback when multiple visitors are speaking. Once you arrive at the page, allow your browser to access your microphone and webcam if you'd like to interact with others. Type in a username (this is the name other see), agree to the privacy statement, and hit 'enter show'. Stand close to other visitors and speaking bubbles will spontaneously appear, or enter an audio room to connect. Encounters unfold just as they would in the physical world. See you there :)
1st 17:00 - 20:00 pm PDT / 01:00 - 04:00 CET (IRL and online)
The Internet Archive has reached an extraordinary milestone: the archiving of its trillionth webpage. This civilization-scale achievement marks decades of dedication to preserving the ephemeral nature of digital culture and ensuring universal access to human knowledge. From its founding mission to create a permanent record of the internet's evolution, the Archive has become an essential infrastructure for memory in the digital age, safeguarding 866+ billion webpages, 41+ million books and texts, millions of software programs, images, videos, and audio recordings.
To commemorate this historic moment, San Francisco interdisciplinary arts and technology non-profit Gray Area has partnered with the Internet Archive to commission a series of original net.art works that engage with the vast holdings of the Archive and explore what it means to create, preserve, and access culture online.
Register for the physical event
4th 18:00 - 19:00 CET / 19:00-20:00 CAT / 20:00-21:00 AST / 21:00-22:00 GET (online event)
Join Tarkib, Andariya and Untitled Tbilisi as they open the doors to their spaces. Together, they form a reflection on our relationship to our surroundings and the cultural and societal layers of meaning that may arise from the tangible and geographic, but irrefutably live on in the spaces we carry with us - unfolded from memory, etched into habit, and rebuilt time and again wherever we go.
7th 10:00-11:00 PST / 19:00 - 20:00 CET / 21:00 - 22:00 EAT (online event)
Explore exhibitions from Munyu, Kunstlicht, Medrar, and Gray Area x The Internet Archive that reveal collaborative practices at work. Discover how multiple hands and minds sustain spaces where communities gather - and what happens when these ecosystems develop lives of their own.
9th 19:30-21:10 CET (IRL and online)
This evening curators, journalists and artists from Georgia, Sudan, Germany and the United States share their experiences through the online platform Distant.Gallery. What can the Dutch art world take along from their case-studies? What are the needed conditions to preserve and sustain art practices when both the physical and digital realms are co-opted, collapsed or rendered hyperreal?
Following these international perspectives, we turn to voices from Dutch arts funding organisations to reflect on the Netherlands’ cultural infrastructure within a global context. We ask whether private funding becomes necessary when the state, conflict, or media threaten artistic or academic freedoms.