Thursday, November 5 – Sunday, November 8, 2026

Red Herring: An exhibition by PIET ZWART INSTITUTE FINE ART CLASS 2025

Opening: Thursday, November 4, 6–8PM

Something is deliberately leading you off track.

Red Herring takes its name from polemicist William Cobbett, who claimed to have dragged a strongly smoked herring across a trail to throw hunting hounds off the scent of a hare. Since then, red herring describes clues or arguments that may mislead or divert attention from what matters and may lead the public to draw the wrong conclusions.

In continuing the Piet Zwart Institute’s annual collaboration with A Table of A Tub, the second-year students of the Master of Fine Art programme present a group exhibition loosely building around this device. Under the umbrella of the red herring, the artists bring together new, recently adapted and site-specific works and experiments that treat the potential of making an exhibition together as a material in its own right—clues may not resolve, arguments may slip their subject and evidence may refuse to convict anyone. A red herring may not be intentional in order to work. That ambiguity runs through the show: some diversions are planted; others emerge on their own.

With Aida Valdes Gomez, Francesco Zanatta, Tindra Eliason, Sara Francola & Paula Punkstina, ida-simone, Janek Nixon, Maurizio Segato, Evelyn Roh, Bárbara Freitas, Kaiyu Wang. Red Herring is brought together by the artists in close collaboration with their core tutor Liesbeth Bik. An essay written by fellow tutor Jan Verwoert will be published in an adapted Bulletin.