Verwacht
MORE Gorssel
7 november 2026 t/m 28 februari 2027

Junk Space

You drive past them every day. The strip of commercial buildings along the motorway. The petrol station in the dead of night. The suburban housing estate that could be anywhere. The soulless shopping centre. Places we all know well, but hardly ever really see.

In Junk Space, more than thirty artists focus their gaze on contemporary public space: on the anonymous, interchangeable and sometimes decayed places that have come to define our surroundings. In paintings, photographs, street art, installations and video works, they explore the places we take for granted. The spaces we inhabit, pass through and often leave again without a second thought.

What do these places say about how we live? About how we live together? And why do so many of these spaces feel both familiar and alienating at once?

For this exhibition, Museum MORE is collaborating with STRAAT, the museum for street art and graffiti in Amsterdam. Together we present artists who find beauty, alienation, humour and meaning in places that usually go unnoticed.

'If space-junk is the human debris that litters the universe, Junkspace is the residue mankind leaves on the planet.'

Rem Koolhaas

What is Junkspace?

The term Junkspace was introduced in 2001 by Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas. In his influential essay, he describes the built environment produced by modernization: airports, shopping centres, office parks, motorways and flats, which could have been built anywhere in the world.

Modern modular construction, soulless building blocks of steel and glass – endlessly cut and pasted, interchangeable. Not tied to a particular location, purely functional. An environment in which every reference to time, history and identity gradually disappears.

Junkspace, wrote Koolhaas, is ‘the encounter between air conditioning and escalator’: comfortable, efficient and completely soulless. It is an environment that is recognizable, but with which you rarely form a meaningful connection.

The city as a mirror

In Junk Space, Museum MORE expands Koolhaas’ concept. The exhibition looks beyond gleaming office architecture and shopping centres to the fringes of the city: the post-war residential neighbourhood, the ring road viaduct, the vacant retail unit, the car park behind the station. At these seemingly forgotten locations, everyday life unfolds through routine, movement and repetition.

It is precisely in this anonymous and generic environment that artists look for traces of human life and the ways in which people lay claim to a place. Because even the most anonymous space is never completely empty. People leave traces everywhere: a mural, a sticker, a vacant shopfront, a meeting place created by locals. This is where identity is born.

Junkspace online: the Backrooms

Online spaces have also developed that evoke that same feeling of recognition and alienation. The Backrooms is an internet phenomenon centred on an endless, fictional space with empty corridors, offices and rooms: places that seem familiar, but that appear to be devoid of people. The concept emerged in 2019 and quickly became a collective internet narrative.

The Backrooms became popular as an example of a digital liminal space: an in-between space that feels simultaneously everyday and ominous. In 2022, the then sixteen-year-old filmmaker Kane Parsons, known online as Kane Pixels, gave the phenomenon new impetus with The Backrooms (Found Footage). His videos were watched millions of times worldwide, establishing the Backrooms as one of the best-known horror worlds in internet culture. In 2026, Parsons made his feature film debut with Backrooms, produced by A24.

The appeal of the Backrooms lies in the everyday: the suspended ceiling, the carpet, the fluorescent lighting, the empty corridors. Everything is familiar, but nothing feels quite right. The Backrooms thus reflects the fascination of Junk Space: spaces that are familiar, but that seem to have lost their human significance. Like recognizing a place you have never been to.

STRAAT and the Dutch Graffiti Library

Junk Space is the result of a collaboration between Museum MORE and STRAAT, the museum for street art and graffiti in Amsterdam. The museums worked together on the exhibition catalogue, and between 29 October 2026 and 28 February 2027, STRAAT Museum will present its own Junk Space exhibition with a selection of some twenty works focusing on questions of space, appropriation and the creation of meaning. The Dutch Graffiti Library also supported the exhibition with advice and practical assistance.

After all, street art often emerges in precisely those places that seem to have been forgotten by the city: under viaducts, on building site fences, in tunnels and on abandoned walls. Where architecture becomes anonymous, the street artist reclaims the space.

Driven by the desire to leave a message, claim a space or go against the flow, street artists turn public space into a canvas. An anonymous place suddenly acquires an identity of its own.

In this sense, Junk Space ultimately asks a broader question: can a place that seems empty, generic or forgotten offer room for creation, meaning and humanity?

Participating artists

Richard Estes, Michael Mau, Arnout Killian, Carla Klein, Steffen Kern, Florens Kool, Stijn Rietman, Frans Clement, Jans Muskee, Thijs Jansen, Jonat Deelstra, Lisette Stuifzand, Mattijs van den Bosch, Siet Zuyderland, Machteld Schoep, Ben Thomas, Stijn ter Braak, Jan Dirk van der Burg, Anna Reerds, Elvira Smit, Koen Vermeule, Clément Poplineau, Dennis Teunissen, Casper Braat, Ben van Lieshout, Maurice van Tellingen, Satijn Panyigay, Bas Losekoot, Romina Koopman, Rudiger Wasser, Mark Lisser.

Catalogue

The exhibition is accompanied by a richly illustrated catalogue, published by WBooks, Zwolle. The catalogue is the result of a collaboration between Museum MORE and STRAAT Museum, and features essays by Sito Rozema, curator of the exhibition and curator at Museum MORE, Petra Brouwer, architectural historian and Assistant Professor of Architectural History at the University of Amsterdam, and Alex Pope, educator at STRAAT Museum.