This year, Conflux Festival returns to Katoenhuis with an exhibition programme. Once again, for four days, the festival will fill our spaces with video and sound installations, visual art, and multimedia sculptures exploring this year’s theme: Tactics for Cultural Resistance.

Works by Forensic Architecture, Anne Wenzel, Yara Mekawei, Forensis, Kinetic Sounds, Amrith de Zoete and Tools for Action, and Underbelly Shop, will be on display.

The exhibition is free to attend and open from Thursday, September 24 to Sunday, September 27.

Opening times:

Thursday 24th: 20:00 – 23:00

Friday 25th: 14:00 – 20:30

Saturday 26th: 14:00 – 20:30

Sunday 27th: 14:00 – 22:30

Conflux Festival is a multidisciplinary art festival that takes place at various locations in Rotterdam. It consists of performances, an exhibition, a conference, a night program, and art in public space. For the past three years, the free exhibition at Katoenhuis has been a recurring feature.

You can find tickets for the rest of the program here. 

Participating artists

Amrith de Zoete | Factory Segment I

Factory Segment I is based on the conveyor-belt systems used in the food-processing industry. The installation consists of a sequence of interconnected bodies, each carrying the same load and bearing responsibility for its own link in the chain. As in his wider practice, De Zoete creates these figures by copying his own body, transforming a personal form into a repeated industrial component.
The arrangement remains deliberately ambiguous: are the bodies being forced together, or are they embracing one another? They appear as part of a factory in which the human body becomes both carrier and product. Through repetition, the individual gradually disappears into a mechanical system of collective labour, dependency, and production.

This work is commissioned by Conflux Festival.

Anne Wenzel | Under Construction (Tactics for Cultural Resistance)

Under Construction (Tactics for Cultural Resistance) explores the possibility of a female perspective on political power and hierarchy as a counterforce to male-dominated systems of power. At the centre of the installation are four monumental ceramic busts of women, positioned high upon pedestals. They resemble classical ideals of beauty: pale in colour, with smooth faces, long flowing hair, and wreaths of flowers upon their heads.
Wenzel has carved texts deep into their faces, leaving them behind like scars. These short slogans, including Fuck the Dictator and I Am My Own Prophet, draw on language used during feminist protests and by movements such as Femen and the Women’s Marches.
Especially for and in collaboration with Conflux Festival, Wenzel developed a series of projections using found footage of feminist protests and demonstrations. Projected through shattered car windows, the images appropriate the forceful visual language of street protest and evoke the overthrow of an established order in favour of a new one: a many-voiced community calling for democracy, freedom, self-determination, and sovereignty.

This work is commissioned by Conflux Festival.

Forensic Architecture | The Killing of Sammy Baker

On 13 August 2020, Sammy Baker was shot to death by police during an episode of mental health crisis which left him separated from his friends and family and lost in an Amsterdam suburb.
Forensic Architecture (FA) and Forensis, in collaboration with Argos/VPRO-Human, reveals how Sammy’s death was the result of a series of failures by the officers involved, resulting in the escalation of a mental health crisis into a tragic fatal shooting.
FA and Forensis were invited by Sammy’s parents to examine the account of their son’s death given by the Dutch state, in light of the available evidence. The agencies reconstructed Sammy’s body position at the time he was shot, combining data from videos, pathology reports, and eyewitness testimonies. Together, these reconstructions allowed for a closer interrogation of the incident than ever before, as well as an examination of the officers’ claims, and of the state’s own investigation into the incident.
The investigation, published as an interactive ‘scrollyteller’ on VPRO’s pages reveals inconsistencies in police accounts of the shooting, and raises significant questions about the investigation conducted by the Dutch public prosecutor.

Forensis | The Killing of Ibrahima Barry

Ibrahima Barry died on 6 January 2024 following a police operation in Mülheim an der Ruhr, Germany. Ibrahima was subjected to excessive and prolonged restraint by officers who were responding to reports of a disturbance at the refugee accommodation facility in which he lived at the time.
Commissioned by the lawyers for Ibrahima’s family, Forensis analysed video material from two bodycams worn by officers involved in the incident. Using video analysis and 3D modelling, and incorporating information from the case file, Forensis reconstructed the events leading up to Ibrahima’s death.
The research reveals the extent of the violent restraint used by the police officers, and concludes that the actions of the officers at the scene contributed directly to Ibrahima’s death. Forensis’ film incorporates the analysis of a world-renowned professor of forensic medicine, Dr Michael Freeman, who concluded on the basis of the digital reconstruction and video analysis that ‘you have to call this death a homicide’.
The investigation was submitted as evidence to the trial of nine officers in Duisburg on 27 August 2026. On 2 September the court rejected the application to include Forensis’ findings, and declined to invite a representative of Forensis to present our findings and methodologies to the court.

Kinetic Sounds

Kinetic Sounds is the result of a long-term Klankvorm research project exploring the relationship between sound, movement and space. Through a series of experiments, rotating sound sources were used to investigate how movement changes the interaction between a speaker and the acoustics of its surroundings.
The installation consists of a collection of custom-built moving speakers that can be arranged in different formations. Each speaker has its own sonic identity, character and movement. In this way different fragments of the frequency range are emphasized and the full sound spectrum is filled.
Kinetic Sounds can be seen as a mechanical orchestra: a fully automated ensemble of robotic musicians in which sound and choreography are directly connected. As the speakers move, they create shifting and immersive fields of sound, transforming the audience’s experience of the space.
The installation also functions as an open platform. Through artist residencies, musicians, composers and artists are invited to create new compositions and live performances for the system. During the opening and closing event concerts will be performed on the installation.
Live performances on the installation will happen on Thursday 24th of September by Maggie Khorrami and Noah Rosa. On Sunday 26th of september Conception Huerta and Puck Wacki & Sou will perform live on the installation. Please check the program page for more info on the artists.

Kinetic Sounds is a Klankvorm production and made possible with the generous support of Creative Industries Fund NL, Mondriaan Fund and City of Rotterdam.

Tools for Action 

Tools for Action develops new forms of assembly and political action through participatory performances, open source skill-sharing workshops, and large-scale inflatable social sculptures. Monumental yet fragile, playful yet confrontational, these inflatable tools become mobile barricades, swarms, and tactical media interventions through choreographed direct-action training. Working across climate justice, anti-fascism, memory culture, and queer and trans* visibility, the collective creates spaces for resistance, solidarity, and collective imagination.
Founded in Berlin in 2012 and emerging from the former Eclectic Electric Collective, Tools for Action has worked internationally in shifting constellations of artists and activists. Since 2019, the collective has operated from Rotterdam through the Tools for Action Foundation. Core collaborators have included Bambi Benkö (formerly Artúr van Balen), Katherine Ball, Jakub Simcik, Tilly Gifford, Sarah Drain, Pascal Espinosa, and Shailoh Phillips.

Yara Mekawei | The Shrine

The Shrine is a multidimensional sonic project that invites listeners into the contemplative heart of Sufi devotion. Drawing from field recordings of Sufi chants and invocations gathered across Egypt, Senegal, and Algeria, the work weaves together urban soundscapes and transcendent spirituality, creating an auditory journey that bridges time, place, and consciousness.
At its core, The Shrine is inspired by tasbih—the ritual repetition of divine names—and the broader practice of dhikr, through which Sufis cultivate remembrance, purification, and union with the Divine. This project transforms these sacred utterances into sound waves using the Abjad numerological system, where each Arabic letter corresponds to a numerical value. By converting sacred phrases into digital frequencies, the work reveals a hidden sonic dimension within the text, where language, number, and emotion converge.
Through a synthesis of mystical tradition and contemporary sound technology, *The Shrine* becomes more than an auditory experience—it is a sensory meditation on divine love, longing, and spiritual transformation. It reflects Yara Mekawei’s ongoing exploration of the intersections between antiquity and modernity, the spiritual and the coded, the spoken word and its invisible resonance.
The Shrine does not merely represent Sufi philosophy—it embodies it, offering a space for reflection, presence, and transcendence.

Zoro Feigl | Interference

For Conflux Festival 2026, Zoro Feigl is creating a new commissioned work that builds on his ongoing exploration of movement, repetition, and balance. Through the continuous motion of simple sculptural elements, Feigl transforms mechanical movement into something fluid and seemingly natural. The forms appear as though they might have been found in nature, discovered rather than constructed.
As their movements begin to depart from what feels natural, however, their rhythms become unsettling. The work plays with this tension between the familiar and the artificial, challenging our perception of what is real and what is constructed. Through repetition, movement becomes both mesmerising and disorienting, shifting between elegance, instability, and discomfort.

This work is commissioned by Conflux Festival.

Underbelly Shop

During Conflux Festival, Underbelly sets up shop in the festival hub at Katoenhuis. Underbelly offers a carefully selected collection of records, tapes, books, magazines, films, handmade zines, musical gadgets and noise toys.
The collection explores underground and avant-garde music, sound art, experimental film, DIY culture, activism and philosophy. For Conflux festival There will be a specific selection on the theme: Tactics for Cultural Resistance.