Bright Measure
Maria Paris Borda & Radna Rumping
9 nov – 7 dec 2025
PuntWG
WG Plein, Amsterdam
Radna Rumping, Companion Images, 2025. A4 prints on window. Photographs by Benjamin Schoonenberg.
Text by Àngels Miralda
The duo-exhibition Bright Measure begins before you even step inside. As winter edges closer and daylight dwindles earlier each afternoon, the gallery at puntWG becomes a light-box, projecting an image of its interior. Radna Rumping uses this opportunity to backlight the piece “Companion Images” (2025), a series of A4 pages pasted onto the windows by the door. A still from the TV programme Het Blauwe Licht (1997–2000) and a screenshot from a Stroom.TV broadcast (2013), set a collage-based visual rhythm before you step inside. The resonance of this image lingers on entering into an exhibition that combines the practices of two artists whose primary medium is not image, but text.
Radna Rumping, Companion Images, 2025. A4 prints on window. Photographs by Benjamin Schoonenberg.
Installation View, Bright Measure, Maria Paris Borda & Radna Rumping. Photographs by Benjamin Schoonenberg.
PuntWG’s exhibition space is warm, bright, and humming with voices. Bright Measure (2025), the collaborative audio work by Maria Paris Borda and Radna Rumping, fills the entrance. Born from conversations held while preparing the exhibition, the piece weaves together the artists’ texts on infinitude and its opposite, on images that slip away, on the small revelations tucked into everyday life. Recordings of the surroundings of puntWG are layered in like an amplified white noise, grounding the work in this specific place even as it reaches toward something more elusive.
Maria Paris Borda, Sunstop Sky, 2025. Sunstop sky roof panel, mirror vinyl, 50 × 300 cm. Photographs by Benjamin Schoonenberg.
Installation View, Bright Measure, Maria Paris Borda. Photographs by Benjamin Schoonenberg.
Maria Paris Borda’s “Sunstop Sky” (2025) rests on the floor in front of the entrance. It is a sculptural text piece made from opalescent roofing panels. The material itself is industrial, utilitarian, the stuff of warehouses and agriculture. But printed across its surface are the reflective, stylized words “a glimmer (glimpsed),” and suddenly the mundane transforms into something that shimmers. It makes me think of sunsets and the rayon vert – that infinitesimal moment when the refraction of the sun shines emerald green. Paris Borda points towards the ephemeral within material and a poetic construction of words in space that is always escaping, impossible to grasp.
Maria Paris Borda, Arch 4, gouache and confetti stars on millimeter paper, 21 × 28 cm. Photographs by Benjamin Schoonenberg.
Installation View, Bright Measure, Maria Paris Borda & Radna Rumping. Photographs by Benjamin Schoonenberg.
Maria Paris Borda, Confetti Sterren Zilver, 2025. Confetti stars, variable dimensions. Photographs by Benjamin Schoonenberg.
On the left-hand wall, Paris Borda’s installation “Arch 1,2,3,4” (2025) depicts medieval church arches in reference to sacred architecture. Yet, look up! And there you see the arches mirrored in the Punt WG’s own ceiling, and mirrored again within the mundane industrial structure of “Sunstop Sky.” Once more, the sacred mirrors the prophane, the divine is found within the minutiae of the everyday. Paris Borda searches for the spirituality that lies within the quotidian. She deliberately turns away from monumentality, focusing instead on the uniqueness of things barely perceptible. Above one of the carefully drawn arches are a set of small glimmering stars, attached to the drawings with craft glue one-by-one. The work gestures toward something celestial while maintaining its pointedly craft-like, handmade quality. It also makes me think back to the entrance and to Rumping’s use of the windows as a quality of stained-glass transparency, but made of the simplest materials. There’s a tenderness here, a refusal of grandeur that feels radical in its own quiet way.
Installation View, Bright Measure, Radna Rumping. Photographs by Benjamin Schoonenberg.
Upstairs, Rumping’s publication “Shaky Ground (Stubborn Material)” compiles texts about ephemeral works of art, it grounds the exhibition in both artist’s attention to immateriality. Nearby, the audio-collage “Moving, Repetition” (2025) brings together spoken word, music by the Raincoats, and quotations from Sara Ahmed’s Living a Feminist Life. It’s a snapshot of the meaningful reflections of the every-day and the accumulation that slowly drips into the life-long performance of the here-and-now.
Radna Rumping, Shaky Ground (Stubborn Material), 2025. Publication. Photographs by Benjamin Schoonenberg.
After jamming out to the post-punk sounds emerging from closed headphones, the exhibition text points me towards a final work outside of the exhibition. I didn’t make it to the mural that the artists recommend, a permanent work located past the WG’s arches and down the tree-canopied Pesthuislaan, but the fact that they send you there, outside the exhibition space entirely, feels like the final gesture of a playful conceptual trail. Just as the exhibition begins before you are in the space, so it ends in a public space, enveloped in Amsterdam’s quiet urban sounds.
Installation View, Bright Measure, Maria Paris Borda & Radna Rumping. Photographs by Benjamin Schoonenberg.
Maria Paris Borda and Radna Rumping were paired together for this project in an experimental programming format developed by PuntWG’s new team. In this case, it shows how this artistic blind-date format can turn out surprising and inspiring results. Through their shared interest in the ephemeral, a conceptually strong exhibition is collaboratively laced with humour and poetry that embodies a philosophy of feminist care and finesse whose evasiveness is audibly present in punk-rock chords of dissent.
Bright Measure runs at puntWG through December 7, 2025, open Saturdays and Sundays from 2–6 p.m. Radna Rumping gives readings on select Sundays at 3 p.m., with Maria Paris Borda making small shifts to her installation in response.
Maria Paris Borda, Arch 3, gouache and confetti stars on millimeter paper, 21 × 28 cm. Photographs by Benjamin Schoonenberg.
Silver Handout, Bright Measure, Maria Paris Borda & Radna Rumping. Photographs by Benjamin Schoonenberg.
