Dear Artist,

The title for our much-anticipated 20th anniversary event, In It Together, this December at W139, serves less as an explicit theme for our upcoming auction and more as a reminder of our origins — a return to form, a rallying cry to our community and the art lovers around us. Dead Darlings XX — In It Together is a signifier of a shared experience, signalling that sense of unity, solidarity, and mutual support that, as a collective, we have always relied on, are grateful for, and wish to highlight and celebrate in this very special 20th anniversary edition of Dead Darlings.

To celebrate this milestone, not only will there be a full-length auction day that will include a show and auction of up to 80 selected artworks, ending in an old-school W139 bash, but in the weeks leading up to it, there will be panel discussions, t-shirt silk-screening sessions, and a big archival show that will include 20 years worth of Dead Darlings anecdotes, films, images, and a fabulous display of all our back catalogues and publications.

Here’s a little bit of history: during pandemic, the iconic W139 — like many art spaces at the time— was struggling to stay afloat. In response, our collective, in collaboration with Stampa, organised a large exhibition including 193 artists / 169 artworks, that culminated in a successful online benefit auction. Artists and public banded together to help W139 regroup and come back stronger! When we went looking for a location to celebrate our big 20th, they didn’t hesitate to offer their support.

As always, the theme is open to interpretation. In It Together is more a guiding principle: if you have a work that speaks of community, support resistance or solidarity, we’d love to hear its story and include it in our catalogue. Send us works that remind you of the times someone went out of their way to help and encourage you — by offering practical or moral support, providing inspiration or a helping hand. Recall moments when you helped someone else, or created something that wouldn’t have happened without the support of loved ones, colleagues, or the community around you. Making art is often seen as lonely work, a very individual endeavor, and it can certainly feel that way — but here is a chance to remember the times that it isn’t, and give voice to that cooperation and solidarity. In times like these it’s important to remember what we can achieve when we do it together.

In a radical break from the past, for this special event we plan to pool all the profits of the auction and divide them equally among all participating artists, regardless of individual selling prices. A full 70% of the combined final sales will be distributed to the artists. The remaining 30% will help us cover production costs. This is a nod to our beginnings: pushing boundaries, subverting expectations, supporting each other, and testing the limits of capitalism — as always, carried out with a dash of humor and deep rooted love for our darlings.

Dead Darlings started as a subversive, anonymous art auction in Amsterdam in 2005. It has since grown into an international platform with a mission to explore the often fraught, always complex relationship between the price and the value of an artwork. Our events combine elements of performance and exhibition. Our focus is on artefacts whose value is ambiguous: dead darlings — works an artist has created yet, for any number of reasons, never brought to light. The name Dead Darlings was inspired by the phrase “kill your darlings,” something we were often advised to do in art school and later learned to do in our own practices. We wondered: what becomes of these ambivalent works? What if we could help artists dig them up from the dusty corners of their studios and give them a chance to live and be seen?

Doing this through an auction makes sense — it’s a format where buried treasures often come to the surface — but since we ask artists to give up their darlings at absurdly low starting prices, it’s also a cheeky wink to the art market establishment, adopting and mocking one of its most solemn conventions.

In addition to inviting artists to reflect on their process and helping their dead darlings come back to life, we also aim to extend the label of “art collector” to people who might not otherwise afford original contemporary artworks. What we do as a collective is bring something “unseen” into the public eye. Our philosophy has always been to feature established, often museum-level artists alongside emerging and more obscure voices — leveling the playing field and reflecting on why a work was designated as it was, challenging ideas of value, demand, desirability, and commerce. Through years of presenting these works at our auctions and in our catalogues, we’ve been able to expand the notion of what makes a dead darling dead — and, more importantly, what can bring it back to life.