Ahmad Mallah (Palestine/Syria/Netherlands)& Rebecca Lillich//Krüger (USA/Germany) are an Amsterdam based performance duo utilizing symbolic objects as containers to explore conflict and risk through multiple mediums. Intersecting the personal and political, the duo performs open symbols to generate reflection, introspection and connection.
After a two month Doc4-Residency with Nieuwe Vide in Haarlem their first full show, pulling blood from stone opened July 4th 2025. pulling blood from stone is an immersive installation reflecting on the weight of collapsing systems, the painful urgency of hope and the pain of the past within the present. Through video works, live performance and physical installations that reflect on an uneasy idea of home, the duo is entering a new chapter of approach, medium and purpose, entering one another’s histories and exchanging in a chaotic playing field.
pulling blood from stone, 2025
04 Jul t/m 28 Sep 2025
Performance + Installation
plaster, wood, photo transfer, found materials + memories of a house
. Performance: pulling blood from stone is a multidisciplinary performance work echoing the collapse of our current time; utilizing vocal loop, compiled texts drawing from internet comments and songs of grief. In the performance costumes and props constructed from the artist’s abandoned projects are used and it takes place in a life-size installation of a room. The piece is a surreal and absurdist delve into the fragility of our lives and the hypernormativity of now.
Hypernormativity : a condition in which a false or surreal version of reality becomes so pervasive and accepted that it is treated as normal, even by those who know it is not.
. Installation: This piece is made completely from found materials and physical memories of the artists’ past; covered in a layer of plaster, the room is both heavy and fragile. Inside the room there is a suggestion of daily life. Daily objects are coated in a textured plaster while the outside walls hold photo transfers of the artists’ personal and cultural pasts, hung between clothing and abandoned artworks. The work invites the audience to step into the uncomfortable now, a daily reality felt more and more as horror becomes normalized.
Photo: Hermance van Dijk
Photo: Hermance van Dijk
Photo: Hermance van Dijk
. The Wall, 2024
Video installation - 5:54
Film by Jesse Immanuel Bom
Light by Kees Willems
Filmed in 2024 as a part of the series The Price of Bricks, The Wall is an experimental installation and film wherein the artists’ hold each other through a constructed wall. The surreal image of being held by a border allows the viewer to reflect on how we want to be held, what limits us and what comforts us.
Photo: Hermance van Dijk
. pulling blood from stone - film, 2025
Film by Jesse Immanuel Bom
Light by Kees Willems
. Film: Within the film adaptation of pulling blood from stone by Jesse Immanuel Bom, the live performance is presented in chapters, each song exploring a reflection of contemporary decay from the artists’ pasts and present. Compiled of Syrian grieving songs for martyrs, a full text from white supremacist Nick Fuentas as a horny drag queen and other poetic manifestations, the film allows the absence of the live performance to echo throughout the visual exhibition. With brilliant lighting designed by Kees Willems, the film draws the viewer into the pleasure of destruction and the relief of the end.
. The Lullaby, 2025
Installation
bed frame, fabric, plaster, photo transfer, barbed wire
The Lullaby is a hanging installation; a bed swings in an empty room bound by barbed wire, the shadows crossing images spread in a quilt pattern underneath it. The images are both from the artists’ familial pasts and cultural experiences, a layered attempt at memory being a comfort in uncomfortable times. Continuing the images of the swing and house in the first room, the exhibition becomes a house, leading viewers through the uncanny feeling of the present heavy with the past, walking into a blind future.
