OpenArtExchange is proud to present Entangled, a duo-solo exhibition featuring works by contemporary artists: Latifa Medjdoub aka Laftmonk & Henri Kalama. We warmly invite you to the opening on Saturday, October 17th at 15h00 at OpenArtExchange, Hoogstraat 85, Schiedam. 

The exhibition will be on view until Saturday, November 28th 2026. 

Entangled

Entangled explores the invisible links that bind beings, emotions, materials, and worlds. To be entangled is to be closely interwoven with something else, in a state where one element inevitably affects another. The exhibition considers these systems of connection as living structures: complex, unstable, and constantly shifting, like ecosystems in which every action can generate both positive and negative consequences, order and disruption, growth and tension. 

Through distinct yet resonant abstract languages, Latifa Medjdoub and Henri Kalama create dense networks of colour, fibre, texture, and form. Their works evoke systems in which individual elements overlap, cross, separate, and reconnect, forming complex structures whose relationships cannot always be immediately untangled. Seen together, their works enter into a physical dialogue. Medjdoub’s threads form intricate, architectural structures, while Kalama’s layered colours and textures give his compositions a fibrous or threadlike quality. Fibre and thread thus emerge not only as materials or visual forms, but as structures of connection: individual lines and elements becoming part of something larger than themselves. 

For Henri Kalama, abstraction is not born in opposition to figuration, but as an action. Working with palette knives, Kalama gives form to his inner turmoil, sensations, and thoughts. As representative elements recede, colour, light, and texture remain. For Kalama, colours are the most profound expressions of emotional states and inner experiences that cannot easily be translated into words. They carry sensations, memories, places, and states of being that lie beyond rational language. Layers of paint accumulate, conceal, and reveal one another, creating passages in which colour seems to emerge and disappear. Kalama conceives abstraction as a shared emotional language, one capable of reaching beyond cultural and geographical boundaries. His work suggests that no emotion is entirely solitary: whether positive or negative, what we feel can find echoes in the experiences of others. Through this recognition, abstraction becomes a space in which individual experience enters a larger emotional field. 

These invisible connections, made up of individual paths entangling with one another, are at the centre of Latifa Medjdoub’s sculptural practice. Threads and fibres intertwine into structures that exist somewhere between organism and architecture. In her ongoing series Entrelacs (Interlaces), Medjdoub draws upon traditions of interwoven and symmetrical motifs to explore interconnectedness as both form and principle. As lines meet and diverge, overlap and separate, they form multidirectional systems in which each element evolves in relation to another. No single thread exists independently from the structure around it: tension in one part alters the balance of the whole. These complex forms resonate across different scales, from bodies, to natural ecosystems or social networks.  

Bringing Kalama and Medjdoub into dialogue, Entangled considers what lies beneath the appearance of separate things. Across painting and textile sculpture, both artists construct intricate systems of relation, suggesting one vast ecosystem of interconnected forms, emotions, materials, and lives. Within it, nothing exists entirely alone: crossings, tensions, dependencies, and exchanges continuously reshape the whole, whether visibly or invisibly.