Katrina Palmer’s exhibition closed on May 24. The wall she proposed to remove was still there.
During the exhibition, the institution’s front doors were not.
They lay flat on removal blankets. In their place stood an exterior metal door screen carrying a notice: EEN ANDERE WEG IS MOGELIJK / Another Way Is Possible. The wall remained, but the way through the wall had already been substituted. The proposal did not remove the building’s front. It changed what stood at its opening.
The title had already reduced the building to description: Four-Story, Flat-Roofed Complex in a Somewhat Expressionist Style. It sounds less like a title than a planning note, the kind of phrase that lands on a heritage register, where every building must be assigned a type and “somewhat” is the only honest qualifier. Palmer wrote that she wanted to spend the duration of the exhibition removing A Tale of A Tub’s front wall. The proposal was already a piece of writing.
The easy reading is institutional critique: artist against host, artist against wall, demolition as exposure. It is the wrong frame. Palmer’s own statement says the wall is porous. She was not proposing to remove a sealed barrier. She was proposing to remove the structure through which the institution and the housing estate relate across one another. Without the wall there is no across. There is also no institution. Removing it would not produce contact between art and dwelling. It would erase the form contact takes.
An institution housed inside residential architecture survives by letting its front wall read as architecture, as something the building has rather than something the institution requires. A wall taken as given organizes a building without appearing as structure. Palmer’s proposal forced it to appear as the choice it is.
A Tale of A Tub occupies the former bathhouse and washhouse at the center of the Justus van Effencomplex, a social-housing estate built around collective use. Residents once came there to wash and launder. The institution now occupies that same architecture under another category of care, culture, and public use. The wall separates exhibition from residence, art from domestic life, institution from housing, but it also allows relation across that separation. It makes the institution possible inside a residential structure.
Removal could not happen, and the reasons were not incidental. The building has heritage status. The institution cannot exist without its front wall. The exhibition could not exist without the institution. Palmer also named the ethical problem herself: she is critical of aggressive territorial claims while temporarily occupying a site and proposing an act of forceful abstraction. The proposal could not execute as demolition. Because it could not execute, it could not become a transferable claim about other walls. It was trapped inside this institution, this housing estate, this protected building. A demolition that could be exported would become metaphor. This one could not.
What the proposal could not execute, it produced. Palmer wrote that the work was already underway: a consultation process had been set in motion, incorporating the curator and interested parties. The consultation was not preparation for the work. It was the form the work took when demolition could not happen. This was not participation as content, or consultation as outreach. It was the only register in which the proposed cut could execute.
The meetings were structured around architecture and heritage, the institution’s audience and community beyond the estate, and residents of the Justus van Effencomplex. Consultation mapped the three constituencies the wall mediates, replacing the cut by describing the relations the cut would undo.
Weiner made execution optional. Asher and Matta-Clark cut. Palmer removed both inherited models. There was no optional execution and no cut into the wall. There was, instead, a process: the curator Isabelle Sully, the residents of the complex, the institution’s staff, the artist herself, in conversation about a thing that would not happen. The conversation was the gesture’s executable form. Weiner declared. Asher cut. Palmer convened.
On the ground floor and below it, nine steel props ran floor to ceiling. They were the equipment of removal, the temporary supports used when a load-bearing wall is coming out. Here the wall had not come out. The building behaved as if demolition were imminent and then stopped there. The proposal put the institution into a provisional construction state without allowing demolition to arrive.
The front doors lay flat on the floor, bracketed by props. A perforated metal screen had taken their place. The notice was mounted there. What stood between the institution and the housing estate was no longer simply a door but a screen with an instruction on it: Another Way Is Possible. The proposal had executed where the building could tolerate it: at the threshold, not at the wall.
A locked glass-fronted noticeboard held documents under institutional seal. DEMOLITION / SLOOP gave the proposal the form of a demolition document. The signs belonged to the language of detour, closure, consultation, and route, the language a city uses when space is about to change. The proposal entered the languages that would normally precede action.
Three chairs faced out of the building, as if the institution had installed a posture of looking toward the estate. Drawings held door-shaped ghosts over ruled paper, openings sprayed into the space between lines. Some were mounted on boards from the institution’s own wood stock, so the host’s material held the work that proposed to alter it. A video recorded under Palmer’s desk sent the work downward, away from the public force of demolition and back to the underside of writing: knees, table, floor, the body below the sentence. The exhibition moved through basement, ground floor, and mezzanine, dispersing the unexecuted cut through the building.
Upstairs, the café facilities had been relocated from the ground floor, and the reading space spanned the entire mezzanine. A short story, set out in stapled A4 sets in English and Dutch, followed a protagonist composing Notes Towards a Paranoid Construction. The title pointed toward a structure assembled from suggestion, relation, and suspicion. The proposal made the institution, residents, heritage status, consultation, notices, props, doors, drawings, and architecture readable as one structure. The show’s most explicit object, sitting on the mezzanine in the form of a story, described its own procedure.
Palmer has long made work from structures around absence. End Matter, her 2015 Artangel commission on the Isle of Portland, was built from appendices, postscripts, maps, indexes, and other apparatus around a missing body of text. The Touch Report, her 2024 National Gallery project, replaced paintings with a reading room and a book. In the earlier works, absence was the condition Palmer wrote around. In Rotterdam, non-removal was the condition the work produced from. The wall was not missing, and it could not be made missing. The writing did not compensate for absence. It produced visibility around something that had to remain.
When the exhibition closed on May 24, the bathhouse still stood, the housing estate around it still stood, and the wall between them still held. None of those facts had changed. What changed was that the wall, for a few months, had been forced to appear as a wall.
The wall remains. Its neutrality does not.
