Specters

tegenboschvanvreden presents Specters, Hamza Halloubi’s third solo exhibition at the gallery during Amsterdam Art Week 2026 and the Rijks Open Studio’s. New works including video, paintings, and installation will be on display. Hamza Halloubi develops narratives that unfold in a sphere that balances between documentary and fiction. He approaches history in a poetic manner with recurring themes such as reading, memory and exile. These narratives, situated somewhere between the personal and the collective, run parallel to the official version of history, whilst questioning it:

“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?

Ventriloquism prompts reflection, a contemplation of the echo. It asks what the echo reveals about who is granted a voice, and where. It leads to a form of phonic spatial organization, an atopia. Stuttering, by contrast, disrupts temporal continuity, representing an achronia. In my installation, these two phenomena are intertwined; after all, no voice can manifest without being exposed to spatial and temporal contingencies. For me, it is precisely in this vulnerability that the potential for any voice lies.

Specters explores the tension between eloquence and stuttering, speech and silence; ultimately, it addresses the stuttering of the world itself. The voice, whether spoken, performed, dubbed, exposed, or stuttered, is the installation’s central element, in an attempt to simultaneously create both a symphony and a cacophony.”