playbill is very excited to welcome you to its new permanent home at Sint Jansstraat, an office that is also an archive that will be, on two occasions throughout the year, a presentation space as well. To celebrate, and to inaugurate a new facet of our activities called SETTINGS, we’re welcoming Moniek Toebosch back to the ‘stage’.

With this in mind, SETTING I: Moniek Toebosch elaborates on ACT II, when we first presented the work of Toebosch back in 2022. In this act, through a restaging of her work Kop op Kop [Head to Head] (1994), Toebosch’s self-reflection via serial portraiture was set alongside a form of feminist institutional critique, which questioned the presence of female subjectivities within the collection of the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam at the time—most often rendered by male painters rather than female artists, and kept from view in the museum’s storage depots. Here, in SETTING I, the personal rubs up against the institutional once more, this time through the presentation of two films made by Toebosch in 2000.

First produced for her retrospective at Marres, House for Contemporary Culture, Maastricht, De Wereld Verklaard [The World Explained] is a video composed of six segments. In them, Toebosch both catalogues and describes six of her past works. It’s a full-length portrait (of a practice), wherein tight and plain, behind a table, she summons her previous works through language, performing via the use of word and gesture, in turn reconfiguring expectations around what a retrospective can be. In the second video, Welkom, gaat u zitten [Welcome, take a seat], Toebosch invites the audience in and encourages them to make themselves comfortable before going on to give a speech— a medium repeated throughout her practice as well as during her time as a radio broadcaster and director of DasArts—about her desire to transform the museum into a welcoming home.

In engaging with the format of a retrospective (and playing with it just as Toebosch did), SETTING I: Moniek Toebosch aims to push at the limits of what exhibition making can be—two films in a semi-renovated space—in turn ensuring we recommit to a promise we set ourselves as a platform when we began, especially given the ‘growth’ that comes with taking on our own space: that being, to stay true to the small-scale. Correspondingly, Toebosch’s presentation at playbill activates connections between historical and future displays of her work, as SETTING I: Moniek Toebosch precedes a large-scale survey exhibition, which is currently being developed by LI-MA, Stedelijk Museum Breda and Rozenstraat – a rose is a rose is a rose, to be launched in 2026. Through Toebosch’s own ‘welcome speech’—and a selection of furniture and household items kindly loaned from Rozenstraat on behalf of the three institutions hosting the survey—we in turn welcome you to this new chapter, where we hope to imbue the hospitality and warmth of Torpedo Theater into Sint Jansstraat 35 as well.