Amsterdam is Getting a New Museum for Genre-Defying Sculpture and Performance Courtesy of DRIFT

Amsterdam’s storied art scene is set for a new venue: The Drift Museum, an aspiring nucleus for experimental art that will open in the Van Gendt Hallen in early 2025.

The museum comes from artists Lonneke Gordijn and Ralph Nauta, whose studio of the same name has platformed projects that explore the grey space between art and technology since 2007. The renovation of the Van Gendt Hallen, five historic industrial halls, is spearheaded by its owner, Eduard Zanen.

DRIFT will occupy two of the five cavernous rooms. It’s a good match for typical DRIFT offerings: large-scale, genre-fluid performances, sculptures, and installations which, in body and spirit, rarely conform to gallery conventions.

Though, rarely isn’t never: The announcement of DRIFT’s first dedicated physical space follows its successful solo exhibition at the Stedelijk Museum in 2018; DRIFT projects have also been hosted by the Victoria & Albert Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and Pace Gallery. No two presentation look alike, but many resemble fantastical architecture; mutating constellations that drip from the ceiling, or brutalist blocks that (appear to) float with an alien elegance. The point, it seems, is to inspire curiosity about the structures we built only to temporarily inhabit.  

“The Drift Museum is the outcome of everything we have been working towards for the past 17 years. We hope it will be a place that generates wonder and emotional responses from our visitors and where they feel more connected to our planet and nature,” Gordijn and Ralph Nauta said in a statement.

Last month, DRIFT staged a performance of Franchise Freedom, their famed drone performance, in New York City‘s Central Park. The performance used 1,000 drones, considerably larger than previous iterations of the work.