The long middle | Exhibition Opening
Line up: Marie Ilse Bourlanges, Youngeun Sohn, Romy Day Winkel

Exhibition opening event: Saturday 9 May 2026, 17.00 until 21.00
with a performance at 18.30 by Youngeun Sohn

Exhibition open: Friday, Saturday & Sunday, 14.00 – 18.00 and by appointment.

Finissage: Sunday 24 May, 14.00 – 17.00

Part of the puntWG Open Call Series

The long middle is a collaborative exhibition by Marie Ilse Bourlanges, Youngeun Sohn and Romy Day Winkel. Through sculpture, installation and performance works, the exhibition takes weaving as its underlying logic and as a way of thinking about embodiment and materiality.

The long middle explores bodily engagement with materials like silk, hair and willow bark, and the works share an interest in maintenance work: actions that must be performed continuously in order to keep things going. Weaving thread, shaping bark, and brushing hair are all durational gestures. Through them, materials and bodies are kept in use, shaped by prolonged contact with one another. This closeness to material can be tender, yet also awkward, tedious, or uncomfortable. The exhibition does not idealise this work, but stays with its ambivalence.

The exhibition title draws on multiple references, including Kate Briggs' book The Long Form, which reflects on the sustained effort of creative work while caring for a child. 'The long middle' also refers to the challenging middle phase of a project, after novelty has settled but completion remains open. A mode of labour that is ongoing and often invisible. By allowing such tensions to remain unresolved, The long middle resists sanitised narratives of bodily engagement with materials. Contact is neither purely nurturing nor purely degrading; it is a fact of working with and through bodies.

This ambivalence resonates with the history of puntWG, housed in the former Wilhelmina Gasthuis, where bodies were shaped by regimes of care, control, and hygiene. Working within this history, the exhibition refuses the clean separation between care and strain, maintenance and exposure, tending and being worn down.

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Romy Day Winkel’s work takes a map of her own hair loss as its starting point. Since she was a teenager, she suffers from alopecia areata: an autoimmune condition in which the body attacks its own hair follicles, causing patches of unpredictable hair loss across the scalp. For this exhibition, she has translated this pattern into a map with its own decorative logic.

To map the alopecia pattern, she turned to punch cards: strips of perforated material developed for the Jacquard loom to automate the weaving of decorative textile patterns, and the direct ancestor of the computer. Across these works, the involuntary alopecia pattern enters that system, finds a common syntax with industrial weaving, and returns as ornament.

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Youngeun Sohn’s work, From Lip to Knee, is built through a script that interweaves historical accounts, bodily knowledge, and literary fragments. Within it, thread moves through bodies such as insect, weaver, laborer, and myth. Each exists in close relation to thread, not only as material they handle but as a structure that shapes the body itself. Thread is pulled from the mouth, softened, chewed, warmed, and stretched. The body becomes a site where material is continuously generated and depleted.

Her contribution combines a physical installation as a self-made loom with a live performance that interprets weaving as a spatial and temporal process. The loom uses the tension of threads to stitch fragmented research into a lasting surface, while the performance translates weaving into gesture, shadow, and projection. Script, installation, and performance are tied to one another across different forms and durations.

Central to her work is the relation between body and thread, observed without distinction. Drawing from sericulture, textile practice, and oral testimony, Youngeun gathers these accounts and blurs them into one another. Here, weaving becomes a form of association: different bodies linked through threads come together becoming a surface.

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Marie Ilse Bourlanges' contribution centers on the common willow (Salix), a natural material embedded in the Dutch landscape and in long histories of bodily and manual knowledge. Initiated during her residency at Nesse–Terneuzen in Zeeland, her broader research explores zinkstukken: large-scale woven willow structures, submerged to prevent erosion in the Dutch dike system, known in English as fascines. For puntWG’s presentation, Bourlanges presents this research as intuitive visual entanglements guided by the willow plant; moving from the intensive labor of its harvest for water infrastructure, to the detailed logics of basketry, and the historical healing properties of willow bark, from which salicylic acid was traditionally extracted as a pain-relieving tincture before being chemically synthesized as aspirin in the late nineteenth century.

Situated at the former Wilhelmina Gasthuis hospital, this history of willow finds resonance with practices of pain management. Central to the work is the relationship between body and labor, articulated through repetitive handwork and the endurance demanded by willow processes. By tracing bodily experience across systems of landscape management, historical craft, and material tradition, the work aims to highlight interchangeable forms of care and violence enacted between land, plants, and human bodies.

Assistance by Menyhért Prágai.

With many thanks to Mondriaan fonds, Nesse–Terneuzen, Adriënne van der Werf, Van Schaik Salix, Betty van Schaik, Stichting Landschapsbeheer Zeeland, Van Oord, Lotte Walvius, Het Zeeuws archief, Jan de Vos, Mandenmakerij de Mythe, Hein Verwer, Zinzi Kok and students of Ghent University.

Graphic design: Jacob Hoving