ABOUT THE EXHIBITION

Pip Greenaway’s graduation project Too Much to Swallow is an immersive architectural installation built around a three-channel video work. Reconstructing the atmosphere of a retail interior, the installation brings together filmed shop windows from London, Paris, Berlin, The Hague, and Amsterdam. These seductive storefronts, become symbols of desire and consumption within contemporary urban life.

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Threaded throughout the installation is a recurring figure, played by the artist herself, who compulsively chews gum until she gradually transforms into the product she consumes. Greenaway uses chewing gum as a metaphor for overconsumption: something intensely desirable at first, quickly losing its appeal, yet difficult to discard.

Sound plays a central role in the installation. Greenaway created an ASMR-inspired soundscape that shifts between attraction and discomfort, heightening the physical experience of the space. This sensory overload mirrors the tension within the work itself: seductive, excessive, and slightly unsettling.

Alongside this key work, the exhibition will also present Family of None, a series of photographic works by Greenaway that explores the mythology of the family and the social expectations attached to it. Developed during her Lakeside Collection residency at Depot Boijmans Van Beuningen, the work constructs a fictional family through a cast of performers aged 6 to 80.

Created with images found at photo booths across different cities and later reshot and reinterpreted, the project constructs a fictional ‘family of none’: an imagined utopia that blurs fiction and documentary. In Western society, where the nuclear family is often treated as the norm, grief, loneliness, and trauma can become privatized experiences individuals are expected to resolve alone.

As staged scenes intertwine with autobiographical fragments, the imagined family gradually begins to fracture. Blurring fiction and documentary, Family of None reflects on loneliness, inherited histories, and the fragile structures through which people search for connection. In August 2026, the series will culminate in a multi-channel installation opening at the Lakeside Collection’s space at Depot Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam.

ABOUT Pip Greenaway

Pip Greenaway’s (2000) practice combines video art, installation, and performance and examines how identity is staged in daily life. She graduated with distinction in 2025 from KABK, the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague, and currently works between Amsterdam and Rotterdam. With a background in art history, theatre, and visual storytelling, her work is drawn to the performative and illusory aspects of everyday existence. To the ways people move on and off stage while shifting between roles, expectations, and forms of self-presentation. From this interest, she creates immersive multichannel video installations that combine sound and three-dimensional elements. Bringing objects and people from the outside world into her constructed tableaus, and attaching allegories that may initially appear absurd, yet are essential to articulate complex social and emotional experiences.

Alongside her artistic practice, she has professional experience in theatre and film, including working as assistant director on Battlefield of Dreams at Theater Utrecht and collaborating with NDT2. She has been awarded the Lakeside Artist in Residence Award at Depot Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam and received the Heden Start Prize. Her work has been shown at Amare in The Hague, BIG DADA, and Galerie Ron Mandos among others venues.

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