Power up your art practice | Programme

• Artun Alaska Arasli (visual artist & theatre maker)
• Claudio Ritfeld (curator, poet & theatre maker)
• Cultuur+Ondernemen
• Elke Uitentuis (visual artist)
• Farida Sedoc (visual artist)
• Jan Hoek (visual artist)
• Kees de Boekhouder (Gersom Naarden)
• Kunstenbond (Annieck van Nimwegen)
• Kunstenbond (Peter van den Bunder)
• Mondriaan Fund (Sreymom Korng & Gijs de Visser)
• Orlando Maaike Gouwenberg (curator)
• Platform BK (Jeannette Slütter)
• Teresa Borasino (visual artist & researcher)

See the biographies of all participants/organisations below.

• Artun Alaska Arasli (visual artist & theatre maker)
• Claudio Ritfeld (curator, poet & theatre maker)
• Cultuur+Ondernemen
• Elke Uitentuis (visual artist)
• Farida Sedoc (visual artist)
• Inez Piso (curator)
• Jan Hoek (visual artist)
• Kees de Boekhouder (Gersom Naarden)
• Kunstenbond (Annieck van Nimwegen)
• Kunstenbond (Peter van den Bunder)
• Mondriaan Fund (Sreymom Korng & Gijs de Visser)
• Platform BK (Jeannette Slütter)
• Teresa Borasino (visual artist & researcher)
• Zoë Tim Hollander (visual artist & curator)

See the biographies of all participants/organisations below.

• Alexandra Phillips (visual artist)
• Ayesha Ghanchi (educator & researcher)
• Bruno Alves de Almeida (curator, architect & researcher)
• Cultuur+Ondernemen
• Diego Tonus (visual artist)
• Inez Piso (curator)
• Jaring Dürst Britt (curator & gallery owner)
• Kees de Boekhouder (Gersom Naarden)
• Matthew C. Wilson (visual artist & researcher)
• Mike Moonen (visual artist)
• Mondriaan Fund (Gijs de Visser)
• Platform BK (Harriet Morley)
• Roy Villevoye (visual artist)
• Zoë Tim Hollander (visual artist & curator)

See the biographies of all participants/organisations below.

• Alexandra Phillips (visual artist)
• Antye Guenther (visual artist & researcher)
• Ayesha Ghanchi (educator & researcher)
• Bruno Alves de Almeida (curator, architect & researcher)
• Cultuur+Ondernemen
• Diego Tonus (visual artist)
• Jaring Dürst Britt (curator & gallery owner)
• Kees de Boekhouder (Gersom Naarden)
• Kunstenbond (Annieck van Nimwegen)
• Kunstenbond (Peter van den Bunder)
• Matthew C. Wilson (visual artist & researcher)
• Mike Moonen (visual artist)
• Mondriaan Fund (Sjoerd Houben)
• Orlando Maaike Gouwenberg (curator)
• Platform BK (Harriet Morley)
• Roy Villevoye (visual artist)

See the biographies of all participants/organisations below.

Alexandra Phillips is an artist living and working in Rotterdam. The path leading to this moment has taken her to many different places including Brooklyn New York, Basel CH, Athens GR, Antwerp BE. At this time, she finds the conditions in the Netherlands ideal for making her work. She became aware of the possibilities in the Netherlands through a decade-long friendship with Dutch Nul artist Jan Henderikse, with whom she collaborates in the form of purepropaganda.org magazine. In 2017, she attended the Jan van Eyck Academie, which was her first long-term working period in the Netherlands. In the past few years, she has worked with various institutions including The Vleeshal, CBK Rotterdam, Garage Rotterdam, Shimmer Rotterdam, Roodkapje, and BRUTUS. It has been an exciting time to show her work, get greater visibility, and continue making. She is represented by Coppejans Gallery Antwerp BE. Future exhibitions include Kunstverein Eisenstadt in July and CODA Museum Appeldorn in September.

Artun Alaska Arasli (Turkey, 1987) is an Amsterdam-based artist and writer. He graduated from the Gerrit Rietveld Academie (2011), and continued his studies at the Staatliche Hochschule für Bildende Kunste with professor Willem de Rooij. In 2018–2019 Artun was a resident at the Jan van Eyck Academie. Artun’s visual work focuses on the moment of the artwork’s reception, while his theatre work revolves around the rehearsal and its metafictional dimensions. He is the founder and co-director of Amsterdam Poet’s Theater. Presentations of his work include Pining, Frascati, Amsterdam (2023); Bird-Time, Bologna.cc, Amsterdam (2022); Prose, Kantine, Brussels (2018); Cardena: Warming Up, ROZENSTRAAT, Amsterdam (2017); Porcupine, Jan van Eyck Academie, Maastricht (2018), and The Beauty Commission, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (2016). Since 2017 Arasli has co-authored (together with Joachim Robbrecht) plays for NTGent, Theater Oostpool, and Het Zuidelijk Toneel.

Ayesha Ghanchi thinks, reads, and practices critical pedagogy. Her PhD examined artist practices in gallery and cultural education, in which she dived into the socio-cultural impetuses for radical pedagogies. In the past four years, she’s worked at the Rietveld Academie exploring how to develop safer spaces and refining their Code of Conduct. She has also worked in other art institutions across the Netherlands as lecturer and facilitator around social justice themes. She is also a trained yoga teacher and brings a somatic awareness to her practices.

Bruno Alves de Almeida (Brazil/ Portugal) is a curator with a background in architecture based in the Netherlands. Currently he is the artistic director and co-curator of the Luleå Biennial 2024, in Sweden, and curator and resident liaison of the Jan van Eyck Academie, Maastricht, Netherlands. His practice is rooted in site/context-specificity and transdisciplinary thinking, resulting in projects responding to timely issues, creating bridges between institutional and public spaces, and experimenting beyond customary formats and spaces for the presentation, production and experience of artistic practice. Bruno has spearheaded exhibitions and site-specific public commissions responding to key urban contexts spanning from São Paulo, Brazil, Maastricht, Netherlands and the northernmost region of Sweden. Bruno is an alumnus of the De Appel Curatorial Programme, Amsterdam, and has collaborated internationally with institutions such as TATE (UK), Harvard Graduate School of Design, Storefront for Art and Architecture, Independent Curators International (USA), PACT Zollverein (Germany), 11th São Paulo Architecture Biennial, Pivô Art and Research (Brazil), among others.

Camille Sapara Barton is a writer, artist and somatic practitioner, dedicated to creating networks of care and liveable futures. Rooted in Black feminism, ecology and harm reduction, Camille uses creativity, alongside embodied practices, to create culture change in fields ranging from psychedelic assisted therapy to arts education. Their debut book Tending Grief: Embodied Rituals for Holding Our Sorrow and Growing Cultures of Care in Community, was published in April 2024 by North Atlantic Books. 

Based in Amsterdam, Camille designed and directed Ecologies of Transformation (2021 – 2023), a temporary masters programme exploring socially engaged art making with a focus on creating change through the body into the world. They curate events and offer consultancy combining trauma informed practice, experiential learning and their studies in political science.

Clare Butcher is an educator and curator from Zimbabwe who cooks and collaborates as part of her practice. She is committed to working within curricular and archival structures to unlearn their logics and redistribute their resources within other times and bodies. Clare was Curator of Public Programming and Learning for the Toronto Biennial of Art from 2019 to 2021, before which she co-led the program unsettling Rietveld Sandberg with Judith Leysner, and was an education coordinator for documenta14. Clare continues to work with learning communities in various contexts such as BEAR, University of Arts ArtEZ, the Centre for Curating the Archive, University of Cape Town, and others.

Claudio Ritfeld (NL, 1985) has been a creative entrepreneur since 2010, developing his professional career as a self-taught all-round artist across a broad spectrum, from pop music to contemporary performance art, and from directing to curating. In the summer of 2022, Ritfeld graduated from DAS Theatre, a master’s program for research-based artistic practices. His artistic education began in 2005 with the theater company 020, under the guidance of choreographer Maxi Hill. In 2020, Ritfeld made his debut as a visual arts curator with the group exhibition “Pop-Up Mosque,” and in 2023, his exhibition “Knights in Shining Armour (reappropriating the appropriated)” was named the best exhibition in a Top 10 list by Het Parool. Currently, Ritfeld works as an independent curator and program maker at institutions such as CBK Zuidoost and W139, and since January 2024, he has been an advisor at the Mondriaan Foundation.

Diego Tonus (b.1984, Italy) lives and works in The Hague (NL). Within his artistic practice, Diego Tonus focuses on reproduction as a tool of investigation to question control systems and power structures by transforming images, objects and collective experiences he selects, in order to put them in a new process of thought and present their underlying structures of codification and normativity. Tonus’s mix-media practice is based on archiving seen as a form of obsessive and creative gesture. This method characterizes the artist’s way of observing events, through the making of sculptures, photographs, performance and film, articulating an approach that defines a process/time based artistic production. Either working with film or journalistic writing (whereby editing allows the re-telling of an individual experience by altering it), voice (wherein precise pitch and modulation techniques influence listener’s unconscious reaction), performance or sculpture (wherewith a specific subject and its history are questioned through the presentation of their new originals), the research of Diego Tonus analyses the balance between narrative’s modes and the content, showing or revealing how much narrative structure is, above all, an instrument of influencing and manipulation of both the public and the object.

Elke Uitentuis (1977) is a visual artist, human rights activist, mother, and full-time collaborator. From 2005 to 2013, Elke was part of the artist duo Osterholt/Uitentuis. Osterholt/Uitentuis realized projects aimed at defining people’s relationship with their immediate surroundings in Amsterdam, Cairo, Istanbul, and Los Angeles. When the collaboration between Osterholt and Uitentuis came to an end, the refugee collective We Are Here began their protest in Amsterdam. Elke became involved with this group of refugees fighting for their basic rights. Together, they founded Here to Support. This foundation established the We Are Here Academy – a school for refugees in limbo – and various art projects such as the theater piece Labyrinth and the cooking project Wij Zijn Hier, Wij Koken Hier. Elke left Here to Support in 2017 to focus on Vluchtmaat. This was a temporary shelter for 40 undocumented refugees and a workspace for artists and social entrepreneurs. Here, the art collective We Sell Reality was born. We Sell Reality reflects on the paradox of closed borders for some and open borders for others. For immigrants without wealth, these borders prove nearly impossible to cross. We Sell Reality makes visible the dependency that arises for some as a result of this paradox. The collective exhibited in venues such as the Amsterdam Museum, Framer Framed, Kunsthal Rotterdam, Kunsthal Gent, and Het Nieuwe Instituut. Elke is currently, along with We Sell Reality but in a larger collective context, establishing a new cultural hub and community center called GROND – a production and presentation space where they will collectively create and experiment with new recipes for living and working together.

Farida Sedoc is a visual artist based in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. She works across various mediums, creating both two- and three-dimensional pieces. Her work is closely tied to the ideology of street culture, where the city and its citizens intersect, continually questioning intersectionality. Sedoc’s work explores and challenges cultural exchange and the influence of monetary economy, heritage, and politics on the future of globalism and community life.

Inez Piso is currently artistic director at Hotel Maria Kapel HMK in Hoorn: an exhibition space and artist-in-residence programme located in a 17th century chapel. She is also the curator of the Amsterdam Ferry Festival. When she lived and worked in Istanbul she was part of After the Archive? an initiative that gains attention to silenced archives and questions the role of archives in the creation of public memory in Turkey. When she lived in Madrid she graduated from the Universidad Autonoma and after that worked four years at the exhibition department of the CA2M.

Jan Hoek (1984) is an artist and writer and founder of No Limits! Art Castle. This is a cultural institute in The Netherlands that is creating more space for unseen artists such as neurodiverse artists, homeless artists, sex worker artists, disabled artists and all in a wild mix with the most unique regular artists as well.

Jaring Dürst Britt is co-founder of Dürst Britt & Mayhew, a gallery for contemporary art in The Hague that he opened together with Alexander Mayhew in 2015. Their gallery represents artists who contribute to the contemporary art discourse using a variety of working methods – from ‘traditional’ media such as photography, painting, drawing and sculpture to video, performance and installation. Besides collaborating with young and midcareer artists the gallery also represents Jacqueline de Jong (1939) and the estate of painter / poet Willem Hussem (1900-1974).

Dürst Britt & Mayhew has an international scope and has participated in several foreign art fairs such as Art Basel Miami Beach, Paris+ par Art Basel, Artissima (Turin), LISTE Basel, ARCO Madrid, Art Düsseldorf and Zona Maco (Mexico City) as well as in gallery collaborations such as CONDO Mexico City, Onsen Confidential (Tokyo), Friend of a Friend (Warsaw) and Madragoa HOTEL (Lisbon).

Before starting the gallery Dürst Britt worked as artistic director of Nieuwe Vide in Haarlem and business coordinator for Casco in Utrecht. He was a board member of De Zaak Nu, a Dutch interest group representing non-for-profit art platforms and currently serves as a board member of the Dutch Gallery Association.

The people who heard the (baggadredging) dralt theory report from someone who could know, pooled money and ordered another bottle of gin. Repetition creates knowledge like a heavenly ladder. They understood better now: Mike Moonen likes sabotaging common sense. To do so he combines never ending narratives and obfuscating tactics to drive in his forever on-going installations, collages, band (LosDQ), films and vehicles. Moonen uses from anything to everything as a tool of collective and individual rides to surprising destinations with possibilities of sudden hand brake. It is a striving to be a chronic misplacement. Not? Self-relativity through clumsy perfection and orchestrated disorder determine the face of the new definition of quality. There is always room on the backseat and you’re always welcome to take over the wheel. Who’s up for a ride?

Matthew C. Wilson is a filmmaker and artist from the United States based in the Netherlands. In his videos, sculptures, and installations, viewers meet human, non-human, and inter-subjective agents that are entangled with natural processes and shape-shifting historical forces. His projects utilize research-oriented, site-specific, and methodologically eclectic approaches often drawing from the sciences to track the inertia of modernity through contemporary ecological crises and into speculative futures. Wilson holds an MFA in visual arts from Columbia University and has been a participant in the Whitney Independent Study Program, Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture, and the Jan van Eyck Academie. He is currently the KNAW – Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences artist-in-residence fellow at the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities and Social Sciences in Amsterdam as well as part of the 2024-2025 Enter the Hyper-Scientific cohort at EPFL – The Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne. Wilson’s moving image works have been screened on Vdrome.org, at IFFR – International Film Festival Rotterdam, the Eye Filmmuseum in Amsterdam, and HKW – Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin.

Orlando Maaike Gouwenberg (she/her) is a curator, initiator and producer based in the Netherlands. She just started as director of Stichting Sonsbeek in Arnhem. The many (interdisciplinary) projects that she has been involved in bring together contemporary art, film and theater. She worked on exceptional projects world wide for institutions like LAS in Berlin, If I Can’t Dance in Amsterdam, Kunstinstituut Melly in Rotterdam, and Performa New York, as well as long term collaborations with artists. She is a specialist in working with artists on projects they never did before. In 2022 she was co-curator for melanie bonajo at the Dutch Pavilion during the 59th Venice Biennial with the project When the body says Yes. At the same time she was artistic director at Jester in Genk, Belgium. Gouwenberg was part of the short and mid-length committee at International Film Festival Rotterdam (2012-2021), was co-founder and director of the multidisciplinary residency program Deltaworkers in New Orleans with Joris Lindhout, which was one of the official residency programs of the Mondriaan Fund and Dutch Literature Fund (2014-2021). She took part in the De Appel Curatorial Program in 2006 under Ann Demeester. She has been on a good number of boards and committees, and curated several graduation exhibitions.

Renzo Martens Renzo Martens (1973) studied political science and art. After making the films Episode I and Episode III: Enjoy Poverty, Martens established Human Activities and its “reverse gentrification program” on a former Unilever plantation in the DR Congo. Together with the plantation workers of the Cercle d’Art des Travailleurs de Plantation Congolaise (CATPC), he employs artistic critique to build a new world – not symbolically, but in material terms. Together, they opened a White Cube that returns the land that was confiscated to the community. With curator Hicham Khalidi, Martens supported CATPC to provide the Dutch entry for the Venice Biennale 2024.

Roy Villevoye (1960, Maastricht) studied at the Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten, Amsterdam, where he also currently works as an advisor. In the late 1980s he was assistant to Sol LeWitt. After a succesful career as a painter in that period, he started following a new artistic course. Especially since 1992 when he began to travel frequently outside Europe, mostly to Papua, the former Dutch New Guinea. From then on his regular stays with the Asmat people inspired him to create a variety of works – first paintings, gradually also photographs and works in other media – about colour, cultural codification and identity. His work has gradually developed as a testimony of uncomfortable encounters and dialogue between two asynchronous cultures, beyond the simplified scheme of progress, the primitive and the mythical and the conventional assessment of values ​​and manners. It reflects the interdependence andcomplexity of this interaction. This is also a motive in a number of the films he has been making since 1998, often in collaboration with Jan Dietvorst.

Rubiah Balsem, founder and director of Studio Balsem, focuses on the crucial role of art and culture in shaping our society. She explores new pathways in cultural dialogues to cultivate curiosity and collaboration within the art ecosystem. In her various roles spanning from intermediary, strategic advisor, moderator to curator and chair of boards, Rubiah guides institutions like Buro Stedelijk, Centraal Museum, GLUE, OSCAM, and Amsterdam Art, advocating for putting the art and artist at the forefront, while also including diverse perspectives on art and culture. Currently, Rubiah directs the development of a new contemporary art museum. Stay tuned for her upcoming keynote, where she will share the insights from her experience and research on art ecosystems.

Teresa Borasino is an artist whose work balances upon the fertile edges between art and activism, the space between poetics and politics, and a radical engagement with social movements. Her practice spans a variety of mediums, encompassing public interventions, performances, installations, soundscapes, video essays, and writing. She seeks to contribute to the pluriversing of the world by nurturing a deeper understanding of relational, sacred, and ancestral cosmologies of exiled communities, while challenging the dominant narrative imposed by colonial extractivism.

In 2021, Borasino embarked on an artistic research into the Andean Cosmovision, exploring its tapestry of ancestral knowledge and practices. Currently, she is furthering this research within the BAK Fellowship for Situated Practice, with a particular focus on unraveling the intricate relationship between ecocide and epistemicide in the Andes.

Borasino is a co-founder of Fossil Free Culture, an artist collective that operates at the intersection of art and climate justice. Born in Peru, she currently resides and works in Amsterdam.

Zoë Tim Hollander is a visual artist, curator, designer, DJ and writer. They graduated from the Fine Arts department of the HKU in 2014 and in 2016 spent a year at the Jan van Eyck academy. Their work explores the relationship between object, meaning, presentation and space in contemporary visual art and beyond. Hollander creates installations, books and scenographies. As a curator, they explore the breakdown of hierarchies and searches for both very physical and substantive connections between artists and their work. Their writings focus on the exploration between the body, space and identity. Hollander’s work has been shown at P////AKT Amsterdam, Kunsthal Rotterdam and Marres in Maastricht. Hollander has worked with many different institutions on different levels: besides their practice as a maker they work as head of communication at art space Nest in The Hague and are a member of the advisory committee for PRO grants at Stroom in The Hague.

Cultuur+Ondernemen is the knowledge platform for entrepreneurship in the cultural and creative sector and a financier for cultural entrepreneurs. It exists to strengthen cultural organizations, as well as independent artists and creatives who wish to engage in entrepreneurship, enabling them to thrive and allowing society to benefit optimally from what culture brings about. To achieve this, they collaborate with governments and funds to enhance the effects of their cultural policies and investments.

They develop and share knowledge, and they connect their target groups with their network of external experts, advisors, and mentors, as well as with other parties within and outside the sector.

Their focus is on three areas: governance, business development, and financing. Expertise in these areas is essential for successful entrepreneurship. Additionally, they provide financing in the form of cultural loans.

As an independent entrepreneur or freelancer, you determine your own path. However, maintaining an overview of your business finances is often perceived as quite challenging. Josse and Pelle from Kees De Boekhouder can answer all your questions about what you need to consider as an entrepreneur, how to get your administration in order, and what rules you need to comply with. They also explain why having a personal accountant is so beneficial and how Kees de Boekhouder can support you as an entrepreneur with your administration.

Kees de Boekhouder is a team of dedicated accountants focusing on independent entrepreneurs and freelancers. Through an accessible tool and app, they take care of your financial administration. This includes tasks such as handling your VAT returns and filing your income tax return at the end of the year.

The Kunstenbond is the trade union of the cultural and creative sector. They advocate for fair payment, good contracts, increased security, and a safe, inclusive workplace. Peter works as an advocate at the Kunstenbond and has an economic-legal background. He particularly focuses on visual arts, self-employed professionals, political lobbying, and the business desk for members. Annieck van Nimwegen is a lawyer working at the legal helpdesk of the Kunstenbond.

Platform BK researches the role of art in society and takes action for a better art policy. We represent artists, curators, designers, critics and other cultural producers.

Platform BK exists for everyone who is committed to the visual arts in the Netherlands. We represent artists, curators, designers, critics and others who work in the art sector or have a warm heart for it. Together with our members, we form an active think tank: we take action for a better art policy and conduct research into the role of art in society.

We do this by engaging in dialogue with interest groups and politicians, by conducting research into government and municipal policy, by committing ourselves to an honest fee for artists, by publishing critical essays on current affairs in art, or by organizing debates, workshops or film evenings, always free of charge for our members. We do this from the conviction that self-organization and solidarity are necessary for a better art climate and a stronger position for everyone working in the art sector.