Experiential agency WINK is working with STRAAT Museum, the world’s largest museum for street art and graffiti, to unveil Time Lines, an ambitious new art experience at Amsterdam Airport Schiphol.
Stretching across 690 metres of transit space, the temporary installation project innovatively transforms a functional commodity – construction barriers – into a living, evolving artwork about travel, time and human connection. The new art experience cleverly conceals and repurposes one of the airport’s largest construction sites. It’s the longest continuous mural ever created in the Netherlands.
The artwork and the artists were curated by STRAAT Museum, the world’s largest street art museum, based in Amsterdam’s buzzy Noord (North) district.
Featuring five internationally recognised street artists – Pref (UK/Belgium), Kevin Ledo (Canada), Jelmer Konjo (Netherlands), Bianca Nemelc (USA) and Eloise Gillow (UK) – Time Lines invites millions of travellers passing through the airport to pause, reflect and experience art in the middle of their journeys.
Bringing together artists at different stages of their careers, Time Lines sees emerging voices collaborate alongside more established names – offering newer artists the opportunity to shine on a major international stage.
Inspired by the famous quote by artist Paul Klee, “a line is a dot that went for a walk”, the installation reimagines the airport itself as a canvas of movement. Every traveller becomes a dot. Every journey becomes a line. At a transport hub that welcomes around 68 million passengers each year, the project turns an everyday transit corridor into one of the largest public street art interventions in the Netherlands.
Together, their works form a continuous visual timeline that mirrors the flow of people through Amsterdam Airport Schiphol every day. Building on WINK’s original wall structures (a unique invention) STRAAT collaborated closely with WINK’s 3D design team to develop a detailed compositional grid to accommodate artworks of varying sizes. The design includes embedded zones for info panels, live art, and complimentary visual pauses, while also responding to pedestrian flow through areas of high detail and large-scale impact.
WINK’s expertise in spatial storytelling and audience movement has been essential in shaping a journey that balances moments of visual intensity with areas of calm.
“This project is so interesting and powerful because it transforms a purely functional, somewhat uninviting construction site into a living street art experience for a global audience.” says David de Bruijn, Chief Creative Officer, WINK. It’s not just a creative achievement, but a technical one too: delivering work of this scale within Amsterdam Airport Schiphol’s highly regulated environment makes it far more challenging than most public spaces.”
“At Amsterdam Airport Schiphol, we are constantly working to enrich the passenger journey in ways that are both functional and inspiring. ‘Time Lines’ transforms a necessary construction space into something meaningful. In collaboration with STRAAT Museum, experiential partner WINK and a group of internationally renowned street artists, we are bringing world-class urban art into the heart of the airport. Together, we aim to create a memorable experience for the millions of people who pass through Schiphol each year.”
Arthur Reijnhart, Chief Commercial Officer
“We are pleased to bring STRAAT Museum to Schiphol with Time Lines. We see the airport as a place where countless personal timelines converge,” says Marion Wolff, director of STRAAT. “By introducing street art into this context, we create space for reflection within an environment that is constantly in motion.”
Like the journeys it reflects, the artwork will never remain static as Time Lines will evolve through new street art additions, digital works and live interventions.
By bringing street art into one of Europe’s busiest airports, STRAAT and WINK blur the line between museum, public space and travel infrastructure, transforming a moment of transit into an unexpected temporary cultural encounter.
