October 17, 2026–January 16, 2027
Beetsterzwaag 9244 CP
The Netherlands
Hours: Thursday–Saturday 1–5pm
Kunsthuis Syb is pleased to present Family Album, a group exhibition with newly commissioned and existing works by Ulises Carrión, Sara Sejin Chang (Sara van der Heide), Robert Glück, Hervé Guibert, Tirdad Hashemi, Hetty Huisman, Peter Hujar, Bastienne Kramer, Matthew Lutz-Kinoy, Ugo Rondinone, and Mikołaj Sobczak.
The exhibition questions how a domestic atmosphere can be reimagined when traditional family structures are absent or insufficient. The artworks introduce a constellation of friends, companion-lovers, relatives, and ghosts, all of whom form rituals and bonds.
The notion of “family resemblance”, or Familienähnlichkeit, by philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein is taken as a cue to bring together works that share no single essential feature but rather a series of overlapping similarities. “For if you look at them you will not see something that is common to all, but similarities, relationships.”
What is a family album, after all? Something you find in the attic with slight cottage-core aesthetics—a retro kind of guilty pleasure. In the exhibition at Syb it is built from moments of joy, clumsy smiles, solitary walks, characters caught in and out of focus: there is, among others, a young artist and writer visiting and documenting the lives of his great aunts in Paris in 1980 (Hervé Guibert); a conceptual ceramicist organising an artistic dinner for fellow artist Ulises Carrión in 1974 (Hetty Huisman); a solitary artist visiting a communal garden in the sole presence of plants and her companion dog (Sara Sejin Chang (Sara van der Heide)); an artist imagining his fatherless Mennonite genealogy in Friesland (Mikołaj Sobczak); and a small piece of bread to be shared in a future still to come (Ugo Rondinone).
Family Album presents photographs, drawings, ceramics, textiles, video, and paintings of intimate moments of connection across decades, as if part of a fictional genealogy. Together, the artworks aim to expand the familiar language of the family album.
For the public programme, the exhibition’s artworks enter into dialogue with local stories and archives from Friesland—in particular, material from the Anna Blaman Huis, a local feminist and queer meeting place from the 1980s and 1990s.
Family Album is curated by Arnisa Zeqo and is part of the multiyear programme Unpacking the House, in which Kunsthuis Syb examines the relationship between the domestic, the social, and the political.
*Is the character with the long hair and the 1970s glasses in the film by Ulises Carrión playing mother or just chewing gum? Or is it the secret boyfriend of uncle Kees?
Public programme
Saturday, October 17, 2026, 3–6pm
Official opening: Family Album, with a public reading by Robert Glück
Saturday, November 14, 2026, 2pm
Exhibition tour in Frisian
Saturday, November 28, 2026, 12pm-6pm
A day long programme around Hetty Huisman and Ulises Carrión in Amsterdam and Anna Blaman Huis in Leeuwarden, including a lunch and a curatorial tour.
Saturday. January 16, 2027, 2pm
Finissage with a special presentation around the life and work of Hervé Guibert
For press inquiries get in touch with Titus Nouwens: titus@kunsthuissyb.nl
