When the streets belonged to me.

Friday 19 June 2026 19:30
Saturday 18 July 2026 17:00

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When the streets belonged to me.

Jeroen Arians

19.06 - 18.07.2026

When the streets belonged to me. presents recent work by Jeroen Arians, bringing together the series Find Footage and Conditional Prototypes. The exhibition centers around Jeroen Arians’ fascination with moments where worlds overlap; where ordinary, often discarded objects in the street unexpectedly form new compositions. By paying close attention to these crossings of context, Jeroen Arians reveals a poetic and sometimes surreal quality within the everyday.

Every now and then, such overlaps occur in public space: objects that have been dumped or left behind create accidental constellations. A chair, lamp, table or cupboard, once carefully chosen, becomes part of the street, available to anyone. Jeroen Arians approaches this moment as a form of unconscious image-making. For him, throwing something out is an act of creation in itself, a gesture that produces new compositions without intention.

In Find Footage, Jeroen Arians builds on this idea by actively searching for these abandoned objects. He brings them into his studio, where he researches their material, shapes, and intrinsic functionalities. Through assembling and reassembling, he creates new compositions in which the narrative shifts and new stories emerge. These works function as a public tableau — shaped by both individual acts of disposal and collective patterns of consumption. The title refers to the cinematographic technique of found footage, yet here it operates in reverse: objects found in the street are recontextualized into constructed, almost cinematic settings.

As consumption increases, so does waste, and the presence of discarded objects in public space has become normalized. Jeroen Arians responds to this condition by turning acts of (re)placement into a deliberate artistic process. In earlier works, these newly formed compositions were returned to the street, placed back into an environment that could function as their stage, as if they had never left.

In the series Conditional Prototypes, this process takes on a more minimal and formal direction. Focusing on wooden objects, Jeroen Arians dismantles them and reorders their individual elements into new compositions with their own rhythm and internal logic. These works are no longer returned to the street, but remain as wall-based sculptures. In doing so, they subtly echo the legacy of 1960s minimalism, and the search for a new aesthetic of ordinary structures, as seen in the work of Dutch artist Jan Schoonhoven.

Together, the works in this exhibition highlight the shifting meanings of objects as they move between private ownership and public space. By isolating, transforming, and repositioning what has been left behind, Jeroen Arians invites us to reconsider the narratives embedded in the materials that surround us.