Lua Vollaard is a curator and writer based in Amsterdam. She is curator of contemporary art at Stroom Den Haag, developing projects that respond to questions of the public domain and the institution(s) of justice. She is one half of 

. She teaches at Design Academy Eindhoven and writes for 

Lua Vollaard

Info

I wrote a profile of Diné weaver Marilou Schultz, who merges traditional Navajo weaving techniques with representations of microchip architecture. 

Writing

Publication

Stroom Den Haag invites The Hague-based artist and composer Torus, the alias of multidisciplinary artist Joeri Woudstra, to give a special performance on Saturday 20 June 2026. Taking place within monumental land art work Celestial Vault in Kijkduin by James Turrell, the event will presage summer solstice, the longest day of the year.

Timed to coincide with the sunset, Torus will perform his acclaimed 2025 album Summer of Love. It is a homecoming performance of an album which has toured across Europe, North America, and Japan, unfolding through immersive ambient compositions that invite deep listening.

The final performance in the album’s year-long run, the event creates a unique encounter between Torus’ world and James Turrell’s iconic skyspace. In the middle of the dunes, where light has a tangible presence, Celestial Vault takes shape as a massive crater where people are invited to gaze at the sky. Music, ritual, architecture, light, and landscape coalesce under the changing skies of summer solstice, the earth’s annual brightest rotation around its axis.

Curating

Performance

From Friday the 29th of May Stroom Den Haag presents 

, the first solo exhibition by artist Ana María Gómez López in the Netherlands.

, the artist introduces her layered and sensorial practice where scientific research and artistic imagination intertwine. At the core are ten self-experiments developed by Gómez López or inspired by historical examples. For instance, she undergoes the process of growing a pearl inside her mouth, germinates a seed in her eye, and orients herself—like migratory birds—through earthly magnetic fields. Several of these experiments unfold as works in progress, while others remain unresolved or proved impossible. Together, they form a constellation in which the tension between control and surrender becomes tangible.

The artist positions the body as an influential instrument through which the world can be explored, questioned, and experienced. In 

 she demonstrates the relationship between bodily processes and larger ecosystems, from geology to astrology. Through photography, time-based media, and artifacts, Gómez López dissolves distinctions between scales, disciplines, and forms of knowledge, making palpable how these levels continuously interact and shape one another.

By presenting self-experimentation as a method, 

 offers a compelling counterpoint to today’s data-driven culture. At a time when knowledge is increasingly shaped by algorithms and abstract systems, the exhibition re-centers the body as a knowledge source. 

 shows how our personal and physical experiences are essential to how we understand a rapidly evolving world. 

Exhibition

Gossip, like intelligence, is everywhere and nowhere. It moves in whispers, side conversations, offstage exchanges, and furtive glances; it circulates along social networks and institutional corridors, at once unverifiable and consequential. Dismissed as trivial, feminine, and unprofessional, gossip has also been a vital mode of transmitting knowledge, signaling danger, building solidarity, and circulating intelligence outside of official channels or sharing what cannot be spoken aloud.

This seminar brings gossip to the center of our inquiry into matters of intelligence. What if the rumor, the aside, the overheard conversation, and the whispered speculation are not deviations from legitimate knowledge, but essential to how information is interpreted, shared, and acted upon? Across history, informal networks have carried news when formal lines broke down; secrets have been protected or exposed through rumor; and communities have survived through coded talk, listening practices, and subversive forms of knowledge-sharing and belonging.

 asks how informal communication operates as an intelligence system. How do minor, feminized, or racialized forms of speech become powerful—sometimes dangerously so? What is the politics of the whisper network? How do unofficial channels shape both statecraft and everyday life? And what models of knowledge, care, or community might emerge when gossip is not dismissed as noise, but studied as method?

 considers how intelligence is not only gathered by official agencies but generated through informal infrastructures, embodied knowledge, and fugitive social forms. Exploring gossip across history and mediums—speakers, including philosopher 

, reflect on how these forms are held, circulated, weaponized, and resisted. Moderated by 

, Assistant Professor of Art History and Visual Studies, The New School.

Lecture

Research

Microchips underpin over 70% of global GDP and have quietly shaped the geopolitical, economic, and bodily conditions of modern life. 

Blood from a Stone: The Art History of the Microchip 

argues that the military origins of the microchip are once again determining the technologies’ future, having been punctuated by the distraction of consumer computing. The lecture uses a diplomatic gift from the from the United States as a framing device: national security advisor Jake Sullivan, in order to foment a secretive alliance against China, gifted his Dutch and Japanese counterparts an embroidered emblem of the Japanese myth of Mōri Motonari, three arrows immortalized in Akira Kurasawa’s classic film Ran.

This lecture argues that art history offers a uniquely powerful lens through which to understand the microchip, from its military origins through its dependence on invisible labour, into the present era of AI and geopolitical fragmentation. Drawing on studio visits, museum collections, restricted production facilities, and archival research conducted during a three-month residency in Tokyo, the lecture presents works by artists including Eduardo Paolozzi, the Computer Technique Group, Marilou Schultz, Chiharu Shiota, Atsuko Tanaka, Yuichiro Tamura, Yang02, and Chi-Wu Yu. These artists are shown to have anticipated, resisted, and reframed dominant narratives around technological development — exposing the microchip's entanglement with weapons industries, the exploitation of women's labour in postwar Japan and on Navajo reservations, and the precarious geopolitics of Taiwan's "silicon shield."

The lecture also reflects on photolithography — the stone-etching process by which microchips are made — as an art form in its own right, and asks what it means that so much of our world is built on a technology whose cultural dimensions remain largely unexamined. Ultimately, it proposes that artists are often better equipped than economists or diplomats to press blood from a stone: to surface what geopolitical opacity, material scarcity, and forgotten labour conceal.

IMG_1961.HEIC

 explores the foundational contributions of women’s work to the technology industry. From the first human computers and programmers, to the women working at electronics factories in Silicon Valley and beyond, to today’s global network of ghost workers, women have been deeply involved with the technologies that undergird our daily lives. Yet their contributions are often left out of official histories of technology.

New technologies metabolize the body as our bodies metabolize technology. Women had a key role in the production of hardware that powered technological developments over the past 200 years. Their entrance to the workforce always ran concurrently to attempts to automate their labor, yet early on, their skills in fine handiwork and the perceived demurity of their characters were highly sought after. The 

 tracks the motions on the production line that interrupted, refused, exceeded, or otherwise interfered with seamless production.

takes as its structure the wireframe, the main architecture for web coding. Wireframes were an early form of random-access memory storage, woven by hand, often by workers poached from textile mills and watch factories. The wireframe adapted for this website comes from a generation of core rope memory that was used to power the Apollo 11 missions.

From February to April 2026, I was in residence at Artist Initiative Tokyo, a joint residency programme with the Mondriaan Fund. I undertook a research project called 'the art history of the microchip', on the development of the semiconductor industries since the 1950s, the relationship between the Netherlands-Japan-United States in this field, and works of art that have engaged with these technologies, materials, and histories. 

Together with de Willem de Kooning Academy Research Centre, I presented 

, a series of short presentations with members of international Permacomputing groups.

Permacomputing is a growing community inspired by permaculture, oriented around issues of resilience and regenerativity in computer and network technology. Permacomputing.net acts as a hub and entry point into these networks. They recently received the 

 award to create a guide to help the creation of permacomputing communities everywhere. 

Stroom Den Haag is hosting two days of exchange between groups from the Netherlands, Germany, and the UK. This occasion marks the first international Permacomputing meetup, and expands the ongoing discussion around sustainable and collective approaches to computation, drawing from permaculture practices.

During an afternoon of short presentations, followed by a moderated discussion, members of permacomputing groups will share recent activities, tools, and reflections from their local nodes, touching on topics of ecological- and communal infrastructures and care in technical systems. The event provides an opportunity to learn about the struggles, hopes, and approaches to radically rethink everyday technology and computational culture.

Moderating

During Museum Night on Saturday 11 October Stroom presented a video programme by 7 artists and makers from The Hague based on the theme 

, inspired by Jenna Sutela’s exhibition.

Screening

For Design Museum Den Bosch, I wrote about 'Echt Meisjeswerk' (Real Girls Work), on the ascending workforce of girls employed by Philips Semiconductors in Nijmegen. 

 traces how global high-tech employment in microchip manufacturing has historically become a container for a particular type of girlhood.

For the INCA project 'Data Materialiaties', I presented Superkilogirls practice and recent works, including some very recent research on the links between Karl Marx and the Philips family. The presentation happened alongside a presentation by Lorenza Pignatti on her work on Radical Cartographies, and was moderated by Maurilio Pirone.

The first solo exhibition of Finnish artist Jenna Sutela in the Netherlands, ave bossa, bow ole is a world made of brains.

The exhibition’s title is a poetic reinterpretation of “As Above, So Below,”a principle from ancient hermeticism – an esoteric philosophical tradition. It refers to the effects of celestial bodies on earthly mechanisms: the sun guides the seasons, the moon affects the tides, and the microcosm of a creature follows the movements of the cosmos itself. This principle is echoed inave bossa, bow ole: across both floors, two distinct spatial systems create environments that interlock with one another.

Central to the exhibition at Stroom Den Haag is the concept of ’tech povera’, a makeshift genre that Sutela coined to describe her approach to technology in the context of art. Tech Povera is raw, experimental, and living technology. The term references the 20th century art historical movement Arte Povera, which considered art as a living process rather than a fixed object, and found meaning in materials themselves. Similarly, tech povera proposes to rethink the technological object as a porous entity distributed across networks of human and nonhuman relations. Not as fixed object or solution, but entangled with social and environmental systems at all scales.

Jenna Sutela is known for her extraordinary collaborative practice in which biology and computation mutually question and reinforce each other. The works include chance elements and evolving structures. Previous projects of Sutela were undertaken in collaboration with slime molds, extremophilic bacteria, Martian oracles, and machine learning lava.

Stroom Den Haag, in collaboration with KABK BA Fine Arts, present the 

 lecture series. On 2 October, Stroom and KABK Fine Arts invited Finnish artist Jenna Sutela, known for her extraordinary, collaborative practice in which biology and computation mutually question and reinforce one another. Her works incorporate elements of chance and evolving structures, being both live and alive.

jenna-sutela-kabk-©paula-punkstina-3.jpg

For the Hmm, I spoke about the research Superkilogirls has done into Philips Semiconducters in Nijmegen, where women entered the workforce to make microchips from 1953-2006. The lecture is part of the research I'm undertaking as part of Superkilogirls, the collective that researches the
material infrastructures of computing, its entanglement with women’s labour,
and how the historical marginalisation of these efforts reverberates now.
A ‘kilogirl’ is a material unit that for a short time in the mid-twentieth century
measured computer power, based on the women whose work underpinned the computers’ operations. A ‘kilogirl’ represents the computer power of 1,000 women doing one hours’ worth of work. 

At Konstfack Stockholm, I introduced the project Curriculum Veto, on the invitation of Marti Manen and Carmen Lael Hines for the Curatorlab atheme 'Platforms & Performativity'. 

 takes as its starting point the CV: the ultimate, universally recognised, individualised standard, that conditions labour. The abbreviation for the Latin ‘curriculum vitae’, or, ‘the course of life’; its name implies an incorporation of life into work. 

 starts by critically investigating this entanglement, from the deep history of the CV to its role today. 

 questions the CV as a standardised form to represent work in general, and artistic practice in particular.

The project was first developed into a play that was staged at the National Theatre in 2022. The play focused on the theatrics of the CV, paying particular attention to the role of bluffing and the notion of confession on art world CV’s. It subsequently travelled as an exhibition, featuring 10 contributions of Curriculum Vetoes: forms of rejection of the traditional CV, containing instead the work that artists refuse, omit, or conceal. Finally, it was written up in an essay that reflected on the role of artists’ CV’s in access to funding.

Stroom Den Haag hosted a group discussion as part of the exhibition 

. The discussion features the artists Juul Hondius, an artist exploring the position and history of NATO in his work; Arnout Brouwers, a geopolitical expert; Anika Schwartzlose, an artist whose work focusses on the role of the strategic dissemination of images; and Wim Zwijnenburg, Project Leader for Humanitarian Disarmament at PAX and coordinator of the European Forum on Armed Drones. Drawing on his expertise, we will discuss the power of visualizations in representing conflicts. The debate will include voices that question NATO's position and aim to clarify the difference between allyship and allegiance.

Seminar

 and recounted the history of NATO in Europe. With his lecture 

 Vladislav Shapovalov talked about his research into a traveling exhibition that NATO presented in a circus tent on public squares across Europe in the 1950s. Kristina Benjocki and Stijn Verhoeff's film 

While the Pile of Rubble Grows Towards the Sky

 traced the long history of NATO’s mysterious war headquarters in Maastricht, carved out of miles of limestone mines. 

This workshop by Cultural Workers Unite and Alina Lupu addressed the concept of ‘artwashing’. It was aimed at cultural workers, artists, designers, and curators who want to investigate the entanglement between their work and ‘dirty money’, war profiteering, increased surveillance, and distractions from violence.

Art funding is under pressure, while defense budgets are increasing. Cultural Workers Unite researches how artistic practices are being coopted in venues and schemes that are used for the normalization of militarization on the European continent. Art and its institutions aren’t neutral; this workshop broke down what art washing is, how it happens, and what you can do to resist it. From boycotts and walkouts, to petitions, agitprop strategies, to memes, and creative disruptions, it will explore real-world tactics for refusing complicity. How do you say no when funding is tangled up with military systems? How do you organize a cultural strike? How do you build strategic alliances?

Together we looked at case studies from artists and collectives who’ve gone head-to-head with institutions. Participants brought stories, questions, and frustrations. No experience was needed: just your politics and your practice.

For the first time in NATO’s 70-year existence, The Hague hosted the NATO summit. Located between the city centre and NATO’s security cordon, Stroom Den Haag hosted 

 an exhibition that contextualises NATO’s stated role and historical presence. 

 considers the historical dimensions of NATO as a political and military alliance. Alliances – a term towards strategic ends - are formed on account of the existence of a common enemy. 

 refers to the necessity of conflict or the threat of conflict to maintain the alliance. This cost consists not only of an economic value, but of a shared cost in the shape of history, the loss of common ground, cultural values, and ultimately, human lives. The project addresses the contradictions of complicity inherent to NATO: when does peacebuilding become a propaganda tool? What is the difference between individual and collective agency? What can we expect from allyship, and what do we provide in return? 

 presents four works by four contemporary artists, contextualised by a public programme. The works on display speak to the culture of geopolitics, touching on themes such as secrecy, arms race, propaganda, the West, and the notion of a ‘world citizen’. Together the works reflect on the displacement of matter in service of NATO’s mission. 

 film shows a semi-fictionalised account of the relocation of the NATO-statue in front of their Brussels’ headquarters. 

’s video installation sketches a portrait of the miles of tunnels underneath Maastricht that used to be NATO’s wartime headquarters. 

’s installation recounts the story of NATO’s 1950s traveling exhibition ‘Caravan for Peace’ to look for its contemporary potential. Drawing upon the current conflict in Ukraine that implicates NATO’s mission, Lotte Geeven’s 

, broadcasts the heartbeats of Ukrainians at the front lines.

I was a participant in Triple Canopy's Publication Intensive, a free two-week program in the history and contemporary practice of publication. During the Publication Intensive, Triple Canopy editors and collaborators lead discussions and workshops with participants, who research, analyze, and develop projects that hinge on new technologies but also mine the history of print culture and artistic practice.


The Publication Intensive addresses such questions as: How have artists, writers, and technologists used publications as vehicles for material experimentation, political expression, and the cultivation of audiences? What defines a publication today, and how is that definition complicated by shifts in labor conditions, technologies, and readerships? How does publication drive efforts to organize people and test out new ideas?

The program includes conversations led by artists, writers, and designers as well as visits to studios, archives, and cultural institutions.

The opening night of Crit Club: Meme Debates focused on the dilemma: ‘Do institutions need memes more than memes need institutions?’ This question hits at the core of the relationship between memetic strategies and institutional structures.

Social media, run by large corporations, determine the spread and even survival of memes through their algorithms. This makes memes dependent on these platforms. However, collaboration with institutions can give memes legitimacy in such a way that they are seen as cultural products that reflect the state of contemporary affairs. Academic analysis can increase the impact they have and give them a place in social discussions. Moreover, archives, museums and libraries play a crucial role in preserving these fleeting but cultural expressions for the future.

At the same time, institutions are increasingly dependent on memes to stay relevant in a digitising world. Memes reach large, especially young, audiences and make complex topics accessible. They reflect current emotions and trends and offer valuable insights into society. Institutions risk missing an important part of contemporary culture if they ignore memes. In this debate, speakers such as Cihad Caner, Lua Vollaard, Florian Cramer and Karen Archey will approach this question with their perspectives from art history, historiography, political science and collective memory. The debate will be moderated by Ilga Minjon. 

Review

"Ballistics Girl Bosses and Utopian Hackeresses Duel in Exhibition on Trailblazing Women in Computing". Review of "Radical Software: Women, Art & Computing 1960–1991" at MUDAM, Luxembourg.

An essay exploring the art history of the curriculum vitae (CV). A deeper look into the CV’s role in shaping professional narratives, the stories it tells, and the spaces it both defines and disrupts. Published on the occasion of incurring a CV gap due to the birth of my first child. Earlier versions of a research project into CV’s were presented by Art Goss under the name ‘Curriculum Veto’, at Het Nationale Theater and Mistral Amsterdam in 2022. 

 invited contributors who use their practice to complicate, reimagine, or reflect on the scientific method. 

 talked about quantum physics in popular culture and its broader geopolitical implications; 

) investigated the occult origins of rocket science and the contemporary connection between extraterrestrials and spirituality through her work at 

 connected military investigation with medieval demonology; and finally, there was a chance to win books about quantum arts from the Stroom bookshop through an audience game designed by 

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I moderated a conversation between Agustina Woodgate and Andrew Barlow.

How can art and design communicate the abstract concepts of quantum computing to a larger audience? In a teaching and research project, Köln International school of Design (Cologne, Germany) and the School of Art, Media, & Technology at Parsons School of Design (NYC,USA) collaborate with the DLR Institute for AI Safety and Security (Department of Quantum AI and Quantum-classical Hybrid Systems) to develop concepts of interactive installations that help understand the weirdness of the quantum computing world. After a visit to New York in October, both schools visit Amsterdam to work at the Waag FutureLab and for one-day symposium at the Sandberg Institute of Gerrit Rietveld Academie.

Hosted by Anja Groten and Márk Redele, the event at Sandberg Institute will feature an introduction to the collaboration by Nina Juric, Michie Pagulayan, Lasse Scherffig, and Sven Travis. This is followed by a keynote lecture by Agustina Woodgate, who will introduce her art and research projects on quantum communication. From DLR, Andrew Barlow will introduce his research group’s work on quantum computing and quantum AI. In addition, students of the project will present their work-in-progress prototypes and discuss them with faculty and graduate students of Sandberg Institute.

This overview of the past five years of Bassem Saad’s “world-historical” practice engages with different forms of mourning the victims of “the American Century.” The term, coined by Henry R. Luce in 1941 and which the Marxist scholar David Harvey has argued “disguised the territoriality of empire in the conceptual fog of a ‘century’,” finds its antidote here: Saad’s latest exhibition is grounded in events, people, and sites, merging documentary history with acid aesthetics and revolutionary zeal.

 by Agustina Woodgate. The talk brought together experts in quantum communication to critically examine the latest quantum technological developments. Speakers included Mariagrazia Iuliano & Kian van der Enden (QuTech), Tom O'Dea (CONNECT, Science Foundation Ireland) and Ramon Amaro (Nieuwe Instituut)

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I presented a special video program with short videos by young artists from The Hague that tied in with the theme of Agustina Woodgate's exhibition 

. Contributions by Michela Meliddo, Anne Fehres & Luke Conroy, Pedro Gossler, Adele Dispasquale, Priyageetha Dia, and Zeno van den Broek. Curated together with Leana Boven.

Really? Art and Knowledge in Time of Crisis

 was a full-day symposium at Framer Framed. Featuring conversations and discussions on how artists tackle the erosion of trust in knowledge and the rise of disinformation through their investigative and critical practices. I contributed by introducting Superkilogirls in conversation with Paulo Cirio. 

An international events and artist-in-residence programme from the Goethe-Institut, exploring emerging quantum technologies through the lens of art. I contributed by giving a lecture to the artists in residence about the process of making the exhibition 

 with Agustina Woodgate in collaboration with QuTech.

, the first solo exhibition by Agustina Woodgate in the Netherlands. Exploring the relationship between temperature and information, the exhibition stages an experimental communications infrastructure that reflects the unpredictable transactions between measuring and knowing.

 is the outcome of a three-year long research project on quantum communication. On the occasion of the exhibition, Woodgate has collaborated with QuTech, the Dutch research institute for quantum computing and quantum internet. Throughout her investigation, the artist has gotten exclusive access to visit the laboratory and work alongside the scientists. This process coincided with the moment scientists at QuTech undertook an experiment in pursuit of quantum entanglement: the connection of two particles without physical transportation. This experiment worked towards a first demonstration of quantum communication on a metropolitan scale, in this case from the laboratory in Delft to a KPN test center in The Hague.

 uses the principles of quantum physics and the building blocks of quantum communications to build its own system. The individual artworks draw from the same materials used in QuTech’s laboratories: diamonds, lenses, time, and temperature. Experiments on the future of communication take place under extreme artificial conditions, such as near absolute zero temperatures, total stability, and with synthetic imperfect diamonds, rapidly grown in the laboratory. In 

, Woodgate critically examines the realization of these conditions to demonstrate their subordination to an increasingly volatile environment.

 presents a synchronized, site-specific, and responsive circuit in which temperature is both the enabler and concealer of information. This circuit consists of an entirely new body of work, which wires together various components: 

—an array of infrared lamps and passive sensors, containing phrase poems etched into their surface; 

—a two-channel sound and video installation, edited in real time, dependent on atmospheric conditions; and 

—a thermal printer which present the readings of the circuit as a climate log, which disappears over time. 

, existing works which are adapted to the context of 

, present the slippages between temperature, time, and the way each are valued.

The World's Youth for Climate Justice two-day Climate Justice Story Lab was held on the beach of The Hague, the Netherlands, together with 

 The Climate Justice Story Lab was a space for climate litigators, storytellers, campaigners from NGOs and foundations, journalists, activists, and scientists alike. While considering the threats of climate change, participants explored the opportunities of using the law to advance climate action. I contributed by talking about the way in which artists can provide new imaginations for climate litigation in connection ot Th Hague's institutions of Peace & Justice.

Up until the 1950s, the term ‘computer’ referred to the women who input calculations into the machines which would later take their name. In these production lines, women were often considered ‘noise’, and considerable effort was extended to make their production frictionless, mechanical, and automated. What would computers look like if the labour that has developed its components were acknowledged?

During a two-day working session, Superkilogirls worked with archival materials to initiate a Manual for Superfluous Motions. The manual reinterprets historical and recent documentation from their research on the production of computer components to find the friction, sabotage, nonstandardisation that occurred in excess of the production line. Can inefficiency be emancipating? Which movements have resisted automation?

During two afternoons in -1 at the Nieuwe Instituut, Superkilogirls hosted a collaborative performance that rehearsed these superfluous motions, together with co-workers, saboteurs and fellow computers.

Kilogirls are a material unit that for a short time in the mid-twentieth century measured computer power, based on the women whose work underpinned the computers’ operations. A‘kilogirl’measured the computer power of 1.000 women. The collective 

 researches the material infrastructures of computing, its entanglement with women’s labour, and how the historical marginalisation of these efforts reverberate now. Superkilogirls is a collaboration between Camila Galaz (USA), Ana Meisel (UK) and Lua Vollaard (NL). Camila and Ana together host 

, a podcast exploring alternative & non-western computing histories and their relationship to society.

 on Saturday 7 October 2023, Stroom Den Haag presented a special video programme with work by artists and creators from The Hague who respond to the theme of 

 is a series of events in which artists present imaginations of the impact of the Dutch and Hague colonial past in the present. Featuring contributions by Jiyoung Yim and Lou Kim, Yan-Zhi Kang, Georgie Brinkman, Aileen Ye, beast, and Jakob Ganslmeier and Onias Landveld. Curated together with Ilga Minjon.

As a visiting lecturer at the NCAD MA Art & Social Action, I gave a few lectures different curatorial & artistic strategies that seek to challenge, reimagine, or intervene in narratives of justice produced by the international courts located in The Hague, titled 

Education

I interviewed Werker Collective and The Question of Funding about their experiments with blockchain to remake the art world, in an article titled "How Digital Artworks on Blockchain Can Change the World" (Hoe DAB de Wereld Verandert", NL only).

I was on the jury for Designers Write, an open call for designers to publish a text accompanied by a podcast contribution.

Jury

The Drempelprijs has been awarded annually since 1962 by the Municipality of Rotterdam (Gemeente Rotterdam) to one or more graduates of the Willem de Kooning Academy. I was the chairman of the jury of the Drempelprijs to the 2023 Honours Programme, awarded to Sadie Grigorie. 

I wrote the exhibition text for the exhibition Angles Morts by Kyulim Kim and Andoni Zamora. The booklet consisted of three texts, "Visibility", "Concentration", and "Simulation". 

Together with Iliada Charalambous, I presented the work 

 at Stroom considers the materialities of border regimes, both in the EU as well as outside of it. The following three contributions addressed the affective and psychogeographical dimensions of borders, their displacement and fragmentation across the globe:
Mohamad Hafeda's film Sewing Borders reveals the experienced nature of borders in the context of displacement in Beirut;
Isshaq Albarbary's performance-lecture investigates the materiality of his Dutch ID-card, addressing the state bureaucracy disclosed by the absence of an indication of his country of birth, Palestine ("XXX");
Vera Wilde's talk addresses the role of lie detecting in the policing of the EU's border, through theuse of the iBorderCTRL algorithm.


Who owns the future landscape? What does the future landscape currently look like, and how can it be envisioned differently? New York author Elvia Wilk will present her book 

. This event is organized in collaboration with Alice Bucknell and the Berlage Institute for Architecture and Urban Design at TU Delft. Part of the public program of 

constellation of essays that considers the kinds of narratives that will help us rethink our human perspective toward Earth. The book begins as an exploration of the role of fiction today and becomes a deep interrogation of the writing process and the self. She examines creative works across time and genre in order to break down binaries between dystopia and utopia, real and imagined, self and world.

One week after International Women's Day, Stroom invited people to gather in Iliada Charalambous' installation 

 to commemorate women's struggles towards liberation. 
The evening started with the performance 

, an ongoing collaborative project by Iliada Charalambous and Sophie Mak-Schram. It is a collective reading of letters of solidarity exchanged between Zapatista women and the Kurdish women's movement. The performance engages with the notion of ‘herstory' - an alternative retelling of history - and reflects on the gathering of a Zapatista delegation with Kurdish women in Eindhoven in October 2022.

It is not coincidental that this event was organised on the day of the provincial elections. With 

, Charalambous explores the potential for direct democracy, and proposes a neighbourhood assembly - a way for a group of people to make decisions about their collective ways of living.

This event was part of the exhibition 

Stroom Den offers a stage to artists based in The Hague.

 was a group exhibition featuringnew and recent works by Andrius Arutiunian, Louis Braddock Clarke & Zuzanna Zgierska, Iliada Charalambous, Anastastija (Nastija) Kiake, and Narges Mohammadi. Starting point for the artists is The Hague; the city that, as an (inter)national center of power and authority, derives its identity largely from its relationship to other places.With the works, the artists question the definition of "the public domain". They highlight processes and systems that may be hiding in plain sight. The works in the show are connected to how the public domain in the city is shaped, and on the other hand, how

 are crucial in making the fragmented identity of The Hague. The exhibition focused on local sites such ascommunity centers, public parks, military airfields,institutions that police national borders, andpieces of outer space kept in local archives.


 examines specific algorithms based on facial micro-expression used in EU border surveillance; 

Louis Braddock-Clarke and Zuzanna Zgierska

 auction off slices of a reproduced meteorite, questioning the appropriation of materials from space; 

, on the basis of 100 conversations with neighbors, proposes a way for local communities to organise themselves; 

presents a monument to the changing character of The Hague's working-class neighborhoods; and 

 has researched addresses of arms dealers in The Hague to question the militarization of the Dutch landscape.


As part of Art Goss, I contributed to Shaping Solidarity, moderating one of the sessions about solidarity in the arts.

Solidarity has grown to be one of the most frequently used rallying cries in the arts, connecting artists and activists in struggles against social and economic injustice, violent displacement, climate disaster, and other societal urgencies. Why is solidarity such a powerful and appealing ideal? What is the solidarity at play in these practices? Who is in solidarity with whom, and why? During 

, we will explore historical and theoretical dimensions of solidarity in the arts and connect them to practitioners’ perspectives. Together, we will develop a deeper understanding of what solidarity in the arts is, or could be.

This event was organized by Valiz, de Appel, and Platform BK. Speakers and facilitators include Eszter Szakács, Lara Khaldi, Mirror Soup Kitchen, collective Kukhnia, Rosa te Velde, Gizem Üstüner, Jue Yang, Radio Alhara, and Art Goss.

exhibition at the Rijksmuseum, with particular attention for the framing of the camera obscura as the new technological methods by which Vermeer constructed his paintings.

, during which a group of students investigated why so much of art writing seem like word vomit. Where 

aporia, radically, space, proposition, biopolitical, tension, transversal, 

interrogated, questioned, encoded, transformed, subverted, 

What language do we speak and to whom are we comprehensible? How does the language that we speak gatekeep the world we are a part of – and formalise who can be a part of this world? In this workshop, we will be writing a satirical take on three types of common artspeak genres: the psychoanalysis (artist statement), the confessional (art CV), and judgment (exhibition review).

As part of the collective Art Goss, I made the video 

(2022), which started from a collection of postcards from the early 20th century that depict gossiping women and torturous devices that were used to keep women from gossiping. 

On 15 October 2022, I organised the symposium

, on reenactments of political violence as an artistic strategy.

Reenactment is a method that recreates a past event in order to better understand it, and to imagine the conditions necessary to effectuate a different outcome. Reenactment can make information in/accessible. It allows for the anonymizing of original actors, places, and events. Didem Pekün’s film 

 takes the form of a rehearsal to a performance that may or may not have happened. This staging, based on a hundred pages of script taken from declassified government transcripts, collapses several places: the UN headquarters in New York City, the Un headquarters in Skopje, and the UN compound in Potočari. The confusing of these places and actors allows to liberate the audience from preconceptions they may hold, revealing the futility of peacekeeping’s bureaucracy. As such, reenactment here operates as a mode by which to imagine a different outcome, based on the reali-sation of truly different conditions in the present, in order to not repeat the past.

Reenactment materialises events within a media-saturated world. Events that are inaccessible, imagined, or take place over a period of time too long or too short to be represented can be reenacted as a single staging. 

In Permanent Trespass (Beirut of the Balkans and the American Century)

, Bassem Saad and Sanja Grozdanić looked upon the second half of the 20th century and the present from the standpoints of Beirut and Sarajevo, situating war not as a limited duration in time but asa historical and material configuration of actors. The performance revisited and punctuated monumental historic accounts such as those of the International Criminal Court and NATO, under the mantle of “the Court of Public Opinion.”

Within this framework, reenactment can be a supportive strategy to the collection and presentation of evidence. Director of the Center for Spatial Technologies Maksym Rokmaniko presented their ongoing investigation reconstructing the missile hit of the Mariupol Theater, 16 March 2022. In a radical expansion of a single second, the model and the testimonies that reconstructs the bombing events can now operate as a recording of devastation. This mediated approach allows the event to be restaged as evidence within the theatre of law.

Can we imagine a world where we live on par with bacteria? How can we learn to listen to other voices in nature, and learn to (recognize) the relationship between ourselves, the water, the ground on which we live, and all living tissues around us? Especially for 

 I put together a film program with videos by students and recent graduates of the Royal Academy that discuss the symbiotic connection in nature and the role that technology plays in this. With works by: Lucy Cordes Engelman, Hattie Wade & Mauro Tosarelli, Dario di Paolantonio, Aiym Zhaishylyk, Georgie Brinkman, Anastasija (Nastija) Kiake. Curated together with Ilga Minjon.

 was a presentation of new video work by Anna Dasović. The work is part of Dasović's Srebrenica series (2015-ongoing), in which she focuses on rhetorical structures that make genocidal violence visible and invisible. Central to her work is the figure of the bystander and the ways in which the 'unimaginable' and the 'unrepresentable' relate to diminish the responsibility for witnessing violence. The work 

 is based on fieldwork in several towns in Republika Sprska, Bosnia and Herzegovina. Dasovic visited these places to study how public space is increasingly shaped by representations of Serbian nationalism.

 was part of the inaugural project of the Hartwig Art Foundation. The work was donated to the Dutch National Collection.

Together with Marina Otero and Amaneh Solati, we ran an architecture studio called 

at the MA Architecture, Urbanism and Landscape Design, on the limitless quest for lithium extraction.

The CV as we know it was first widely used starting in the 1950s. As deindustrialisation and outsourcing decreased the need for manual labour in the West, the emphasis in suitability for work came to lie on experience, network, and knowledge: the right man for the right job. The promise that the CV holds is one of provable self-narration; a token that will be received impartially, objectively, and provides access to social mobility on the basis of personal, formal merit, instead of on family background, or social status. As such, the CV has been one of the main tools upholding the myth of ‘meritocracy’ - the idea that work efforts will be received because of their quality. If we are to believe the origin story of the CV, the first one was in fact an artists’ CV: composed by Leonardo da Vinci in 1482,
it advertised in ten bullet points his many abilities to manufacture weapons, noting as the very last points his secondary skills in ‘sculpture, painting’. With Curriculum Veto, Art Goss questions the CV as a standardised form to represent work in genera, and artistic practice in particular.

The contributions in the exhibition are Curriculum Vetoes: forms of rejection of the traditional CV. They stem from the notion that the work that artists refuse, omit, or conceal — the labour that falls between the lines of the CV-as-standard — might be much more interesting than the widely institutionalised Curriculum Vitae.

For each point on Leonardo’s original CV, each Curriculum Veto addresses a blind spot of the CV as we know it, such as injury, the gap, agency, visas, gossip, boycott, microwork, emotional labour, discipline, and care. Through these contributions, Curriculum Veto hopes to expose the obsolescence of the CV in the current climate of highly precarious working conditions, as well as challenge the foundational myths of the CV as a tool to gain ‘equal access’ to work.

With contributions by Art Goss, Renée Akitelek Mboya, Staci Bu Shea, Mijke van der Drift, Afra Eisma, Diana al Halabi, Silvio Lorusso, Alina Lupu, Maria Pask, Leonardo da Vinci, and Agustina Woodgate.

Between 6 and 8 May 2022, FOTODOK organized the conference 

(IN)VISIBILITIES, Gender and Photography in the Netherlands

, curated by Delphine Bedel and Daria Tuminas. They invites leading actors working in the Netherlands—artists, curators, activists and scholars—to expand upon the much needed conversations about gender, representation, and inclusivity within the photographic field.

I contributed as part of Art Goss collective.

 are two events in conjuncture with the exhibition 

, that present context, references, or archive material related to the work of the artists in the exhibition. At these events, each artist has the opportunity to provide a situated context for the work they are showing, taking the form of performances, lectures by invited speakers, and screenings.

 Stroom hosted positions relating to the film 

. Both works take a careful observational approach to uncover complicated histories of migration, that bear on the way in which the current social body is constructed. Another commonality is 

, the filmmaker who has been a great influence both in terms of style and content for Wadlow and Henderson. They will each be discussing and showing the relation between their approach to filmmaking with Akerman's.

 takes as its starting point the CV: the ultimate, universally recognised, individualised standard that conditions labour. The abbreviation for the Latin ‘curriculum vitae’,or, ‘the course of life’; its name implies an incorporation of life into work. 

 starts by critically investigating this entanglement, from the deep history of CV’s to the role of the CV today.

As part of the collective Art Goss, we developed the theatrics of the CV, paying particular attention to the role of bluffing and the notion of confession on art world CV’s. In the piece, an anonymous art worker received unsolicited advice from a technologically aided Leonardo da Vinci, the original inventor of the CV. The performance played 3 times: on March 6th, September 15th, and September 16th. 

 presented video work by five artists who work in an international context: Eliane Esther Bots, Hannah Dawn Henderson, Karel van Laere, Tineke van Veen & Barbara Prezelj, and Annemarie Wadlow. Responding to issues on a national as well as international level, the artists invite the audience to explore their position with regards to these current affairs. Certain themes decisively emerge: the enhanced focus on a particular site or place; explorations of the fragility of the human body and its interdependence on social structures; and finally, personal and intimate perspectives by which to enter complicated issues, from the handling of nuclear waste to working within the judicial system.

By bringing together such different voices, 

 captured a snapshot of subjects, approaches and formats in video work today. Using an observational, investigative and experimental approach, the artists found subtle ways to open up new narratives into increasingly complex matters.

The direction in which the future of work is pulling all of us in is still an open question. We’re in flux, squeezed between work shortages, rising unemployment for a younger category of workers, burn-outs, career changes, strikes, pressed by rising inflation, waiting ominously for some variation of metaphorical winter to come, since actual winter is already here.

And then what is the role of cultural workers in all this?
What kind of workers are they anyway?