opening 1 november, 17.00 - 19.30 

Imagine the weather invading your screen: fog slowly covering the interface, and strong winds fueling digital wildfires that blur the browser.

In Tensed Screen, Noor Nuyten’s new exhibition at Upstream Gallery, the climate does not stop at the edge of the screen; it infiltrates our devices, our gestures, and our timelines. The show explores the frictions inherent in the screens we hold in our hands daily.

For over a decade, Nuyten has been questioning the structures that shape our daily lives - time, language, and digital interaction - giving them playful, poetic, and tangible shapes. Her work is rooted in a conceptual practice of sustainable collaboration, which ties in with traditions that resist the myth of the solitary genius.

Materials lie at the core of Nuyten’s practice. As a contemporary alchemist, she rethinks matter through the lens of sustainability, generating alternatives to the linear economy. One outcome of this inquiry is the “NN-matterial”, developed with circular company Omlab from recycled paper data. This material is used to 3D print her tactile, minimalist reliefs, Soft Errors. These works originate from “bitflips”: tiny errors in digital data caused by cosmic radiation. Evoking the aesthetics of the Zero movement, the reliefs translate the influence of the cosmos on our screens into minimalist forms, also subtly recalling Nuyten’s favourite computer game, Snake.

The exhibition title, Tensed Screen, derives from a new series of glass objects. These transparent structures refract prismatic colour, revealing the internal stress held within glass. In close collaboration with glassblowers Marie De Bruyn and Sander van der Wal (Studio-05), Nuyten developed a method to capture and maintain this unstable state without collapse.

Alongside tension, this new body of work arises from a longing for tactility behind the screens that surround us. The works call for reclaiming our devices as ecological and embodied artefacts, not just portals to the virtual. In Wandering Signals, the invisible choreography of wireless transmissions - the energy waves that silently connect our devices - takes shape in playful, creature-like sculptures 3D-printed from plant-based materials. These forms make tangible the unseen systems that sustain our digital routines, from a morning text message to a late-night notification.

Tensed Screen invites us to imagine the invisible tensions and movements within our devices and the materials they contain. Playful yet critical, the works intertwine climate and technology, urging us to trace physical paths, resist automation, and reconsider how we move, sense, and find meaning within these systems.

Tensed Screen also marks the launch of Nuyten’s first monograph*, developed with writer and curator Marian Cousijn, designer Chantal Hendriksen, and publisher JapSam Books.

The book is more than a retrospective; like the exhibition, it reflects the role of fiction in her work and the fact that the word “solo” does not exist in Nuyten’s practice. Each artwork is a constellation of voices, co-produced with clockmakers, engineers, 3D printers, ecologists, and activists, embodied by the signature ‘NN+.’ The book serves as a compass to the exhibition: some artworks act as protagonists in Cousijn’s texts, while others emerge from her fictions. The monochrome edition of Waving the Future, for example, draws from the book’s final story, in which a flooded Amsterdam transforms the Netherlands into a country told in the past tense.

This exhibition is made possible thanks to the generous support of the Mondrian Fund.

 

*Digital Dust and Other Stories. Noor Nuyten

artist Noor Nuyten text Marian Cousijn compilation & editing Noor Nuyten, Marian Cousijn, Eleonoor Jap Sam, Chantal Hendriksen translation Robert van de Walle image editors Noor Nuyten, Marian Cousijn, Chantal Hendriksen final editing Eleonoor Jap Sam design Studio Hendriksen lithography, printing robstolk ® Amsterdam binding Boekbinderij Abbringh publisher Jap Sam Books / japsambooks.nl

11.8 x 18 cm 280 pages
English | hardcover
ISBN 978-94-93329-33-1
Fall / Winter 2025 €29.50

Made possible with the support of Mondrian Fund, Jaap Harten Fonds, het Cultuurfonds, Stichting Niemeijer Fonds, Upstream Gallery Amsterdam

Digital Dust and Other Stories is the first monograph on the work of Dutch artist Noor Nuyten (b. 1986, NL), offering an overview of her practice and body of work.

noornuyten.nl
cousijn.com
studiohendriksen.com
upstreamgallery.nl