Rejection Party

On 13 September, De Bouwput hosted Rejection Party, an event by Alina Lupu celebrating, or at least making public, over 60 professional rejections accumulated between 2017 and 2026.

The event followed a recent rejection from the Mondriaan Fund for a project concerned with artistic labour, precarity, solidarity and the conditions under which cultural workers sustain their practices. While Lupu contested the decision through the Fund’s formal objection procedure, Rejection Party proposed another response: to gather around rejection collectively.

At the centre of the evening was Lupu’s Rejections CV, a curriculum vitae composed not of the exhibitions, grants, residencies, publications, jobs and opportunities that materialised, but of those that did not. Displayed across the wall of De Bouwput, the CV made visible a parallel professional history that usually disappears behind the successful one: applications written and submitted, opportunities not received, positions not offered, funding not granted and proposals not selected.

The entries also pointed towards the considerable amount of unpaid labour involved in maintaining an artistic practice: searching for opportunities, preparing applications, writing proposals, waiting, hoping, being evaluated, receiving a rejection and beginning again. 

Rather than treating rejection solely as an individual failure, the evening created a space to talk about it as a recurring condition of cultural work. 

There were balloons. There was cake. There were snacks.

And, for one evening, what didn't happen became the thing that did.