Presented at Het Documentaire Paviljoen / IDFA Institute, this ‘satellite exhibition’ sits alongside the Biennial’s main exhibition that takes place across venues such as W139, Arti et Amicitiae, and Rozenstraat, and next to a special programme collaboration with Framer Framed. It moves between immersive audiovisual storytelling and visceral sensory experience, bringing together two newly commissioned installations by Dutch-based and internationally renowned artists Femke Herregraven and Sébastien Robert.
Titled Sounds of Skies, Forests of Instability, the exhibition chapter allows you to experience two mesmerising environments – the Northern skies that project aurora borealis and a simulation of a mutating forest – suggesting new ways of sensing through immersion, layering, and emulation.
Recipient of the prestigious Theodora Niemeijer Prize in 2025, artist Femke Herregraven presents The Evacuated, a simulation of a Dutch forest that rewrites itself in real time, inspired by a site that hosts a living field genebank. In this environment, memory becomes volatile, time loops and mutates, and continuity breaks apart. The forest stays in continuous flux – both at risk and a place of risk – rejecting prediction in favour of an existence inside catastrophic time. Rather than documenting a past or projecting a future, the work models memory as active, material, rule-based: remembering through failure, mutation, and irreversible change.
Interdisciplinary artist and researcher, working at the intersection of visual and sound art, technology, science, and ethnography, Sébastien Robert presents All But Silent – an experimental film and installation that explores the sound of the northern lights. Field research, scientific measurement and Indigenous cosmologies each make this atmospheric phenomenon tangible in different ways. Robert’s work moves between these epistemologies to reveal how non-human forces and human meaning-making remain entangled – and how listening can become a method for approaching the unknown.
Together, works by Herregraven and Robert ask how understanding might shift when we find ourselves inside a story, rather than observing it from a distance. This chapter opens for two weeks only – as a concentrated immersive experience within the Biennial programme.
Het Documentaire Paviljoen is open Wednesday to Sunday, 12:00–20:00, and additionally, on Monday, 2 March, 12:00–17:00.
On the exhibition’s opening night, Friday 20 February, Het Documentaire Paviljoen will extend its hours. For more details, visit Openings and Tours. Additionally, on Sunday 22 February, Femke Herregraven and Sébastien Robert will be in conversation with Rachael Rakes – find further information in Artist Talks.
