October 2–November 12, 2025
Amsterdam-based visual artist and researcher belit sağ’s exhibition centers the tenderness of solidarity and friendship as a form of resistance. The show begins with This is Where We Start, Not Where We Stay / Buradan Başlıyoruz, Burada Kalmıyoruz (2025), an installation of archival materials, sourced by the artist, that form a timeline of a labor dispute at an onion-peeling factory in Veghel, North Brabant. Two video screens, shown side-by-side as part of the installation, feature archival television interviews with Turkish women involved in the dispute—often speaking to local reporters with children on their laps—who arrived in the Netherlands in the 1960s and ’70s and took on low-paid, physically demanding jobs to support their families.
With the support of organizer Leyla İleri of Stichting Welzijn Buitenlandse Werknemers, an organization that supported migrant workers in the Netherlands, around sixty-five women workers unionized as a result of the dispute. While liberal and civil rights movements swept across the West, workers from migrant communities exposed the exploitative conditions in which they worked, leading to improvements that ultimately benefitted everyone—including those who had resisted their efforts. In this sense, “Remembering Otherwise,” guest curated by Katia Krupennikova, might refer to the overlooked role and agency of these political actors in shaping Dutch society.
The exhibition’s most affecting moments center on these women’s obvious affection for one another. In the video Layers of a Dispute / Bir İş Anlaşmazlığının Katmanları (2025), Kamile Kahraman and her family, Nazife Kaya, and former organizer Leyla İleri, now in their senior years, watch their early interviews and describe conditions at the factory. As they recall bloodshot eyes, punishing quotas, and windowless enclosures, what stands out most is their warmth and camaraderie. Watching them laugh and gossip as they identify each other in old photographs, while the viewer is seated on a makeshift bench the artist fashioned from a bag of onions, it is hard not to get teary-eyed. In this instance of “remembering otherwise,” the women choose the good times.
Stories of hardship often reduce people to faceless heroism or quiet martyrdom, but to see joy in one another is to recognize humanity, capacity, and potential. sağ’s work restores that sense of wholeness and dignity, showing how these women’s lives contained as much elation as struggle. The right to experience happiness was, after all, part of what they fought for. On the walls, a series of collages (Remembering in its Colors / Renkleriyle Hatırlamak, 2024–25) integrates archival photos of the women into brightly painted surfaces, decorated with sparkly paint and nail polish. These endearing embellishments recall the hopeful vibrancy of young women thrust into difficult adult realities. The recurring image of an onion stands as a metaphor for the layered complexity of the situation.
Amsterdam East, where Framer Framed is located, has long been an arrival point for immigrants seeking equality and representation. The show extends into the civic offices adjacent to the gallery, where bureaucratic district services for residents are housed. There, the artist has hung a colorful seven-meter jacquard-woven tapestry that collages archival materials with visual elements developed for the exhibition, linking the story of the women from Veghel to the lives of today’s migrant communities. At the center of the tapestry is the late Bertien van Manen’s photograph showing women celebrating their 1978 court victory against the factory. The seven-meter-long work (Weaving Solidarity / Dayanışmayı Dokumak, 2025) is printed on woven fabric to bring these communities together and suspend a moment of shared solidarity.
In Turkish, the word for “to weave” is dokumak, whose reflexive form, dokunmak, means “to touch” or “to be in contact.” This subtle linguistic shift mirrors sağ’s sensibility as a researching artist who often works with archives: her continual act of reconstructing and collaging both images and stories repositions the archive in the present tense, reminding us that these struggles are ongoing. The act of weaving itself evokes themes of labor and gendered factory work. In a country that has recently turned away from a far-right government, but where intolerance toward migrants remains endemic, sağ weaves past and present into a continuous thread.
