As 2017 opens there is a sense that all bets are off—that it is time to roll the dice and keep a hand open to all possibilities. Perhaps this is all the more so in the Netherlands—in many ways the closest of the EU countries to Britain and perhaps facing its own democractic crisis with a fractious election ahead in mid-March. In a sense this is both the mood and the motive behind a new joint venture by six Amsterdam art galleries and their opening project, titled “Where do we go from here?” As far as gallery experiments go, the basic premise of trading in the art commodity remains unaffected. Nevertheless, within these limits something quite bold is taking place. This joint venture tries out a new, collectivized form of trading, possibly marking a turn towards locality within the art market and the cultural climate more broadly. The project takes the form of a synchronized exhibition, with works selected from the galleries’ represented artists and arranged by invited curator Alessandro Vincentelli (Curator of Exhibitions and Research, BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead). Hot on the heels of the evermore successful Amsterdam Art Weekend in November, “Where do we go from here?” …

Twenty-first century communication has dramatically changed the way information reaches us. Popular interpretations of knowledge and history seem to do so without historical consciousness and self-reflexivity. Rather than playing with the structure of history, Amalia Pica, in her solo show at Stigter van Doesburg, “One Thing after Another,” concerns herself with the underpinning structure of the structure. She rejects the finality of the object or image, and broadens it from a singular, formal focus to a multifaceted perspective. The exhibition is a continuation of a project that the London-based Argentinian artist began at the Museo Tamayo in Mexico City in the summer of 2013. Next to some colorful Plexiglas sculptures and pastel-colored prints in the smaller rooms, the show’s focal point is the large installation A∩B∩C∩A∩B∩C (2014), which consists of two Plexiglas sculptures and a two-channel video projection. The sculptures, entitled Maremila and Remoromi (both 2014), are a variety of metal structures holding colored geometrical shapes in saturated blue, red, and yellow. They further Pica’s research on the Venn diagram and the set theory it illustrates, which describes the logical, mathematical relationships of inclusion and exclusion, developed by logician and philosopher John Venn (1834–1923). Under the 1976–1983 military dictatorship in Argentina, …

When a speech act contradicts what is said, this is called a performative contradiction. In the mid-1970s, the fight for women’s rights found itself in an inconsistency of this kind, when the general logic of gender construction was cast into doubt. By mapping a useless alphabetical order onto kitchen tools, Martha Rosler’s early video performance Semiotics of the Kitchen (1975) points precisely to this shift from a grammar of signs to a post-structuralist awareness of signifiers being unstable and dynamic. As much as Rosler’s performance stakes out a critical and ironic position towards semiotics—translating and subverting it with supposedly “female” everyday practices—its message is by no means limited to feminist issues. Semiotics was the newly contested theoretical terrain between structuralism and post-structuralism, with the sign and the distinction of signifiers at its core. But a lot has happened in theory, as much as in art, since 1975: the rise of postcolonialism as well as affective, bodily, post-human, and queer perspectives on theories of gender, just to name a few. This is not to say that this exhibition directly addresses feminism, or even feminist discourses. Rather, this multi-generational group show at Stigter van Doesburg captures the subtle and ironic attitude of Rosler’s …