Exhibition ‘Emerging Exits’ in an Arnhem Nazibunker: art between threat and escape

The Arnhemse Bunker is normally closed to the public, but from 3 October 2025 it will be the activity here. During the construction phase, cables mark the walls, wooden boxes are unpacked, light projections are adjusted and murmur technicians. The colossal concrete building is gradually being transformed into art space. In these spaces, once witnessed by war technology and control, Emerging exits become an experience that cuts through history, ecology and imagination.

The location forms the starting point of the exhibition. Built in 1942 by the German Luftwaffe, the Diogenes bunker acted as a command center from which the airspace above the Netherlands, Belgium and Northern Germany was coordinated via radars, observers and telephone couplings. Now, after decades closing, the complex opens only five weekends – from 3 October to 2 November 2025 – to the public, as a temporary gateway to reflection. It is the last chance to visit the bunker, then it closes to the public.

The exhibition is immersive: not a classic museum tour, but an experience of continuous sounds, light transitions and physical interventions. The curators Jacco Ouwerkerk and Marijn Bril consciously opt for a fragmentary structure: Emerging exits Is not a one -sided story but a multi -voiced dialogue between past, present and speculation.

Sensing Threats

The exhibition is thematically structured in three ‘layers’ or chapters that correspond to and respond to the historical logic of the bunker: detection, analysis, and military reaction. In the layer Sensing Threats Is it about ‘feeling’ of threat – before any instrumental detection comes into effect.

One of the most striking works is from Miloš Trakilović. In 564 tracks (Not a Love Song Is Usualy A Love Song) He combines popular music from Bosnia in the years before the war with sounds from war sound archives, analyzed via AI. The technique manipulates what seemed familiar to first: music as a signal, ‘love songs’ as a feeling of need.

Other artists in the layer ‘Sensing Threats’ are looking for alternative sentiments of danger based on rhythm and sound, or by immediately entering dialogue with the architecture of the building. For example, Kees van Leeuwen’s intervention offers a reaction to the extra floors in the bunker that, after the war, when the State Archives settled in it, distributed the central space of the bunker. The scenography by Zalán Szakács also responds to the architecture and its environment. For example, the concrete blocks in the exhibition come from the nearby Kröller-Müller Museum, an element of heritage that is literally reused in the bunker.

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Command Center

The second layer investigates structures of power such as cards, control, and systems. The bunker itself is as architectural manifesto of that power: spaces that were previously filled with communication equipment, cards, and radio nodes. Ali Eslami investigates systems through simulations. In his work Eshraq he connects the effect of the Gulf War to the philosophy of the Persian philosopher Shahab al-Din Suhrawardi. Through game worlds, he challenges the visitor to see relationships between old temple towers in Iraq and the diogenes bunker in which the exhibition takes place.

In addition, work to work in the way cards function: what is mapped, what is omitted, who has the right to see and name? The exhibition removes metaphors from the Bunker war apparatus and turns it around. That’s how the work is Archive of Spatial Knowledge From the Georgian artist Irakli Sabekia dedicated to spatial justice. It records the memories of expelled communities in Georgia in a digital map, and thus anchores them again in the landscape.

Speculative scenarios

In the top layer, ‘speculative scenarios’, artists investigate and fictions. Here artists pass the registering of threat: they outline alternative worlds, myths and ecological and technological speculations.

Sissel Marie Tonn is working on an installation around peat landscapes. Ceramic sculptures formed by scans and glitches come together with a video work in which peat bodies speak. The space thus becomes a entangled criticism of how we deal with landscapes that have been both culturally significant for our ancestors and that they are of value for a balanced ecosystem.

Further on in the corridor, Silvia Gatti is inspired by the entry machine that once stood on this floor. The work starts to encrypt information, and investigates what these processes look like in nature. With this work, Gatti underlines that information and its processing is never objective, but is always subject to interpretation.

The contrast between spaces with war technology and the art interventions is great, but the exhibition is aimed at using that contrast. Technology is used here as an expressive means to let the bunker speak again. This creates fractions and echoes in the concrete body, in which past and future meet.

Emerging exitsDiognesbunker, Arnhem. From October 3 to November 2, 2025. Info: Emerging-exits.nl

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