Open Call:
Become a
Teenage Curator!
Are you aged 15–19 and curious about art? Then join us as a Teenage Curator: you'll discover what a curator does, meet artists and come up with your own project together. You'll learn to collaborate, present and organise. At de Appel, artists, young people and local residents are given the space to create art together, share stories and discover new ideas. Here, you don't just look at art — you participate!
News
05.09.2025
Upcoming
Public Programme
27.09.2025, 11:00–17:00
Play is not a rehearsal for culture, it is its most elemental form. From the Amsterdam playgrounds of Aldo van Eyck to the subversive laughter of Sutton-Smith’s ambiguity, this symposium proposes a radical repositioning of children not as visitors, but as co-constructors of cultural meaning. During the symposium we discuss topics with which we have been engaged with during the process of working on the exhibition CaccHho CucchhA, where we ask questions about play in relation to other aspects of artistic work and urgent topics of our times.
Open Call:
Museumnacht 2025
at de Appel
de Appel invites proposals for performances that explore play as a critical practice for adults. Moving beyond childhood, which the exhibition CaccHho CucchhA by Mercedes Azpilicueta engages with, this programme looks at play as a state of mind rather than an age-bound activity. As a space where adults can unlearn, improvise, and inhabit new forms of collectivity.
News
09.09.2025
Play and Disobedience
Conversation between Mercedes
Azpilicueta and Lara Khaldi
Artist Mercedes Azpilicueta and Lara Khaldi, artistic director of de Appel, discuss the works and themes of the exhibition CaccHho CucchhA, in a conversation that grows over the exhibition span.
News
09.09.2025
Book Bloc Brigade's
book-shields at de Appel
Next to the stairs to the exhibition space you will find a display of shields by Book Bloc Brigade, which was formed in response to the ongoing genocide in Gaza and the violent police repression of students at university encampments across the Netherlands.
News
18.07.2025
Open Call:
Klachtenkoor
The Complaints Choir is back and looking for new voices to turn complaining into an art form. The Complaints Choir is a DIY, community art project in which singers and non-singers alike come together to sing about their complaints. Led by musician Azubike Onwuka, the choir will explore different perspectives and issues by complaining, composing and singing together. The Complaints Choir is serious and light-hearted, and makes room for both recognition and humour.
News
18.04.2025
Play and Disobedience
Conversation between Mercedes
Azpilicueta and Lara Khaldi
Artist Mercedes Azpilicueta and Lara Khaldi, artistic director of de Appel, discuss the works and themes of the exhibition CaccHho CucchhA, in a conversation that grows over the exhibition span.
News
09.09.2025
The Supervisory Board of de Appel
extends Director Lara Khaldi’s contract
for three more years
The Supervisory Board of de Appel is pleased to announce the extension of Artistic Director Lara Khaldi’s contract for an additional three years, affirming its confidence in her collective work with the team and the institution’s continued relevance as a vital site for critical, translocal, and context driven artistic practice.
News
10.09.2025
Upcoming
Event
10.10.2025, 14:00–15:45
The Dialogue Sessions are a series of conversations taking place throughout Palestinian Film Festival Amsterdam, which invite two cultural producers to share short presentations on their practices followed by an extended conversation between them. This year’s series of dialogue sessions opens with a conversation between novelist, poet and playwright Ahmed Masoud and visual artist Isshaq Albarbary.
Upcoming
Event
10.10.2025, 16:30–18:15
In the second of this year’s dialogue sessions of Palestinian Film Festival Amsterdam, we welcome filmmakers Carol Mansour and Muna Khalidi for a conversation with artisan and entrepreneur Belinda Idriss on embroidery, textile tradition, and embodied knowledge transmission.
Current
Exhibition
13.09–23.11.2025
Embracing child-friendly environments means rethinking what behaviour is considered acceptable in cultural spaces. We have been thinking about this recently with artist Mercedes Azpilicueta who will be employing her sculptures as characters and composite costumes for children as well as building a sensory experience where children and adults can experience play as an act of invention rather than mere imitation.
Upcoming
Exhibition
21.12.2025–20.03.2026
The collaborative project The Broken Pitcher by Natascha Sadr Haghighian, Marina Christodoulidou and Peter Eramian traces the effects of financialisation and austerity by looking at the banking system and the potentials for changing the script of interacting with it. At de Appel the project takes a multi-fold formation: a one-to-one scale model of a bank room that functions both as an exhibition space and a film set.
