Sun 9 November 2025 - 19:30
De Balie Amsterdam and online
Presentatie
Digital Explorers | Witte Rook joins distant.gallery festival
The distant.gallery festival has begun! From November 1st till the 9th the festival will be navigating the pressures of austerity, displacement, and precarity on cultural institutions. With this societal decay 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.
On November 9th Witte Rook joins the festival online and at the Balie Amsterdam: Artistic resistance in the age of big tech. Our special guest Anastasiia Manuliak will telk about the project Digital Explorers – Across Borders and the current situation in Ukraine for artists and organisations in general and specifically the situation of Artists in Residence during the entire war. Anastasiia Manuliak is head of visual art programme at Ukrainian Institute and member of Zapravka.
About Digital Explorers – Across Borders
The ‘Digital Explorers – Across Borders’ project is a digital Artist in Residence that enables remote collaboration with artists who are restricted in their freedom of movement. The pilot will start in 2026, in which Witte Rook collaborates with Zapravka and Make Eindhoven. Through digital technologies, we aim to stimulate the creation of new work and the sharing of knowledge, even in places where physical encounters are hampered by war, repression or limited resources.
About distant.gallery festival
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. The coming week the focus lies on how artistic liberties survive 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 disintegration.