Review by Àngels Miralda
Nothing Was Born
Bin Koh
May 29th – June 28th, 2026
The Eelpit
Zuiderkerkhof 7,
Amsterdam
All photography by: Oscar Marie Le Merle
The Eelpit is an unusual art space. At only 1meter and 70 centimetres in height, it is the in-between space that cushions a block of central Amsterdam housing from the reverberations of the metro tunnel that passes below. This hollowed-out tremble-chamber provides a near crawl-space for art in a city where space is increasingly restricted. Within these conditions, Bin Koh’s Nothing Was Born speaks of the importance of nothingness as the source of potential. Of the need for birth in the process of production.
Arranged in a classic frieze structure along the top of the Eelpit is a series of 65 drawings on alternating black and white A4 papers. On them, scribbled outlines of humanesque or demonesque forms hang just below the angle between the wall and the ceiling, highlighting the below-eye-level nature of this space. Through yet another small tunnel that visitors must slide through, another chamber opens up in which a single long scroll is displayed hanging from this same wall-ceiling angle and unrolled through the floor. It is a script-like scroll that begins with sections of geometric cubes that slowly unfold into chaos and scribbled infinity signals showing the tension that exists between control and abandon.
The scroll unmistakably points towards East-Asian philosophy as a standpoint for understanding the demonology of Western capitalism that is ultimately unraveled through not only the architecture of the Eelpit, but also its duality with the symbol of the Zuiderkerk just opposite of its trap-door entrance. Binaries are stark in Nothing Was Born. Black & white / girl & boy / good & evil/ chaos & order / form the philosophical premises of this exhibition that takes over this last bit of nothingness within Amsterdam’s gentrified and touristified centre where piety and capitalist excess spill relentlessly into each other.
During the closing days of Nothing Was Born, Bin Koh performed It’s Nothing. Standing exactly at the height of the Eelpit itself, Koh uses nothing more than a sound piece and a handmade horseshoe shaped microphone stand to do a lip-synching performance that coalesces the dualities found in the exhibition. From K-pop to Western rock, her performance ability is syncopated by demonic possessions and cuteness overloads that work to exhaust the possibilities of capitalist body-politics through marketing aural emotional landscapes.
Koh works thoughtfully with the intention of the art space, appealing to the need for space in order to birth artistic potential. The subject matters strike the personal experiences of an artistic community, progressively driven out of urban spaces, and the spiritual understanding of binary good and evil that structures of the artistic world subject us to. As a whole, the exhibition provides a much-needed authentically punk experience that momentarily brings back an essential identity of Amsterdam’s performance and underground artistic scene that is always getting harder to find.
