Van Abbehuis in Eindhoven opens Piledriver on 13 November 2026, a wrestling-themed group exhibition that treats the gallery as an arena. The show runs until 13 January 2027, with an opening night of performances from 7 to 11pm. Its title borrows a move from professional wrestling, the piledriver, in which one wrestler drives another head-first into the mat, as a metaphor for the exhibition itself: a staged contest between bodies, images and ideas.

The artists include Anna-Sophie Berger, Harun Farocki, Runo Lagomarsino, Celine Mathieu and Jonathan Monk, among others. Their works approach wrestling not as sport but as spectacle, a form of theatre in which heroes and villains are performed, rules are bent, and the audience is part of the act. The works span film, sculpture, painting and performance, and the hang is conceived as a single unfolding event rather than a set of separate objects.

The exhibition is curated by Rawad Baaklini, working with Frederique Scholtes and Kimiya Jahanshahi. Its framework comes from Roland Barthes's essay on wrestling in Mythologies, in which the French critic argued that the ring is a stage for moral clarity: every gesture is legible, every contest a contest between good and evil played out for a crowd that knows the outcome is choreographed and cheers anyway.

By placing wrestling's language inside a gallery, Piledriver asks what exhibitions themselves have in common with the ring, the staging, the personas, the choreography of looking. The opening night, with live performances running through the evening, is meant to make that connection physical: visitors will watch the show being performed, not just displayed.