In I Breathe an Endless Universe in Me (2026), artist Mandy Franca (Rotterdam, 1989) transforms the attic of the museum into an installation of new and existing paintings, photography, sounds, videos, collage, and spatial interventions. Here, air becomes tangible: as the space between bodies, as a memory of connection, and as a material that both separates and binds us.
A cloud drifts through the sky above Schiedam, while on another horizon, hours away, that same sky turns dark into night. Although air connects us, it is constantly in motion, formless and ever-changing. It is also political: not only a carrier of connection, but also of inequality shaped by ecological boundaries, migration, mobility, and air quality. What appears shared is always shaped by distance, memory, and circumstance. Air is the element that connects Franca to her family in Curaçao and to the world in moments of illness, yet also separates her from them. In that tension, a space of silence and reflection emerges. The sound of voices, sometimes singing, sometimes breathing, returns as a carrier of closeness across distance – each breath shares the same air, no matter how far apart the bodies are. In the exhibition, breathing becomes a way of thinking: each inhale draws the world inward, transforms it, and releases it again. Breath and air become metaphors of reciprocity; the body as part of a breathing world, and the world as a breathing body.
Mandy Franca, Self-portrait, Studio in Rotterdam, 2025
About Mandy Franca’s practice
Following exhibitions in London, Amsterdam, and New York, and a residency at the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten (2022–2024), Franca continues to build an oeuvre centered on connectedness, time, and materiality, one that also reflects how technological realities shape our ways of bridging distance and experiencing presence. In her work she reinvents traditional printmaking techniques by experimenting with analogue and digital layers, bringing together painting, photography, collage, sculpture, sound, and video. The photographic image, made with her mobile phone, and her own hand remain recurring elements throughout her work. With part of her family spread across time zones, she grew up with a keen awareness of separation and simultaneity. It is within this irregular fabric of coexisting times that Franca’s work takes form.
Marking time became a way to bridge absence and hold on to life across distance, a gesture that endures in her attention to everyday, fleeting moments. She slows time down, stretches it, and makes the intangible tangible: an attempt to experience closeness within what is transient, faraway, and ever-changing. In a world marked by rupture and catastrophe, her work dignifies life itself and reminds us that the everyday, too, carries weight.
Curated by Delany Boutkan
Headimage: Mandy Franca, MARK II (15052024), 2024