AMSTERDAM.- Pip Greenaways graduation project Too Much to Swallow is an immersive architectural installation built around a three-channel video work. Reconstructing the atmosphere of a retail interior, the installation brings together filmed shop windows from London, Paris, Berlin, The Hague, and Amsterdam. These seductive storefronts, become symbols of desire and consumption within contemporary urban life.
Threaded throughout the installation is a recurring figure, played by the artist herself, who compulsively chews gum until she gradually transforms into the product she consumes. Greenaway uses chewing gum as a metaphor for overconsumption: something intensely desirable at first, quickly losing its appeal, yet difficult to discard.
Sound plays a central role in the installation. Greenaway created an ASMR-inspired soundscape that shifts between attraction and discomfort, heightening the physical experience of the space. This sensory overload mirrors the tension within the work itself: seductive, excessive, and slightly unsettling.
Alongside this key work, the exhibition also presents Family of None, a series of photographic works by Greenaway that explores the mythology of the family and the social expectations attached to it. Developed during her Lakeside Collection residency at Depot Boijmans Van Beuningen, the work constructs a fictional family through a cast of performers aged 6 to 80.
Created with images found at photo booths across different cities and later reshot and reinterpreted, the project constructs a fictional family of none: an imagined utopia that blurs fiction and documentary. In Western society, where the nuclear family is often treated as the norm, grief, loneliness, and trauma can become privatized experiences individuals are expected to resolve alone.
As staged scenes intertwine with autobiographical fragments, the imagined family gradually begins to fracture. Blurring fiction and documentary, Family of None reflects on loneliness, inherited histories, and the fragile structures through which people search for connection. In August 2026, the series will culminate in a multi-channel installation opening at the Lakeside Collections space at Depot Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam.