A conversation on Specters: Hamza Halloubi & Abdelkader Benali

On Saturday 21 November at 4 pm, during Amsterdam Art Week, Hamza Halloubi will engage in a conversation with writer, poet and playwright Abdelkader Benali. In an intimate setting, the two will dive deeper into Halloubi’s exhibition ‘Specters’ at tegenboschvanvreden in Amsterdam.

Halloubi: “The installation I created for the exhibition ‘Specters’ will function as a set of performative instruments, activated by the viewer’s gaze and presence. I view this project as a meaning-generating machine that combines ventriloquist dummies, paintings, and videos.

A key element of my exhibition is the concept of ventriloquism as an echo producing ambiguous, suspect speech—speech where the source of the sound cannot be precisely traced: a voice rising from the shadowy realms of history. But whose voice is it that we hear? And from what location—what place in the world—does it speak? Is it the voice of those who have been deprived of a voice?”

Abdelkader Benali (1975, MA) is a Moroccan-Dutch writer, visual artist, poet and playwright whose work spans literature, theatre, journalism and television. Born in Morocco in 1975 and raised in Rotterdam, he work navigates themes around language, identity, migration, memory and belonging. His novel ‘De langverwachte’ received the Libris Literature Prize in 2003 and his ensuing work received many more awards following that. In 2020 he was awarded the Gouden Ganzenveer for his contribution to Dutch literature.

Hamza Halloubi (1982, MA) currently lives and works in Brussels (BE), Tangier (MA), and Amsterdam (NL). Halloubi holds a Master’s degree in Fine Arts from the ENSAV la Cambre, in Brussels. From 2012 – 2014 he participated in the residency program of HISK, Higher Institute for Fine Arts in Ghent (BE), and from 2015 – 2017 he was resident at the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten in Amsterdam (NL). Halloubi is a multi-disciplinary artist with a focus on video and painting. He had solo exhibitions at Argos centre for audiovisual arts, Brussels (2021/22, BE); Museum De Pont, Tilburg (2025, 2020, 2015, NL); L’appartement 22, Rabat (Morocco, 2019); Museo Hermann Nitsch, Naples (2017, IT); c-o-m-p-o-s-i-t-e, Brussels (2017 and 2014, BE); A Tale of A Tub, Rotterdam (2016, NL); among many others.