Lua Vollaard

Info

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. 

Lecture

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.

Curating

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. 

Screening

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.

Exhibition

Research

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. 

Performance

Writing

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.

Moderating

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.

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

Publication

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?

, I wrote an essay about the gendered nature of contemporary labour as part of Art Goss collective. 

On Friday 26 November, together with Eugenie Boon, I curated an evening of continuous performances around the exhibition 

 by Kevin Osepa, about and featuring ritual practices. With new performances by Eugenie Boon, Travis Geertruida and Guenn Gustina, three young artists responding to the works in the exhibition.

was a multi-media installation about Klof, a tree-lined street in Curaçao by Kevin Osepa. As a child, Osepa was told the ghost stories that circulated about Klof, a road with a dangerous reputation. Behind those stories is a history that remains untold: this is the very place where in 1795 enslaved people revolted and fought a bloody battle against their Dutch oppressors. Osepa used this charged site as point of departure to create images and rituals, which he took back to the Netherlands, a country where this history of struggle and resistance is buried much deeper in the collective memory.

The installation was a direct reference to how the ghosts of colonialism can manifest themselves and disappear. Through a circuit of projections, lights, spatial interventions, and soundscapes in the exhibition space, Osepa cast a protection over the visitors to keep the ghosts of Klof at bay.

Special film programme with work by artists from The Hague centered around the theme of distance. The works were selected through an open call aimed at KABK alumni. Contributions by Natalia Sliwinska, Sophie Czich, Cristina Lavosi, Petra Eros, Hattie Wade, and Vera Yijun Zhou. Curated together with Ilga Minjon.

This edition of Uncertainty Seminars took its title from Gertrude Stein’s exclamation on her return to Oakland in 1933: 

 The place that existed in memory, which is still factually there, is in such a state of transformation that the place thought of is in fact no longer in existence. Distance can be felt, a subjective and affective dimension; over and above, the measurement of distance that has long been hailed as the most ‘objective’ - the Mercator projection - is an effective distortion of distance that centers and magnifies Europe on any image of the globe.

Artists have long challenged representations of distance depicting the world. Feminist cartographies, speculative mapping, challenge these rational, instrumental representations and can contribute to seeing the world differently. This edition of Uncertainty Seminars presented unusual methods to bridge physical, figurative, and metaphorical distances.

With contributions by open-weather, Shannon Mattern, Eline Benjaminsen & Elias Kimaiyo, Tabita Rezaire, Claudio Ritfeld, Slutty Urbanism, and Katarina Petrovič. Curated with Ilga Minjon.

Speculative essay on the future of design museums in relationship to the demise of Antartica. 

A year in which the suppression of a global pandemic has been the first priority, has often felt like being back at square one. Pandemic time is hybrid: spending so much time at home can feel like being slowed down at the same time as being sped up, linear as well as perpetually cyclical. And although this time may feel never ending, it also provides opportunities to imagine radical alternatives to the way we organize our societies: mass gathering, policing, office work, low budget flying, and even democracy have all had their end proclaimed recently.

Science Fiction author 

Kurt Vonnegut theorized that there is a shape to each story that can be diagrammed

. Researchers working from Vonnegut’s theory determined in 2016 that virtually all fiction can be classified into six distinct types; the same linear stories are told over and over. 

 seeks to challenge that idea, by presenting art that connects deep histories to future projections, long histories of labor to sudden accelerations, radical imaginations to lived transformations.

Contributions by Oddkin, Ana María Gómez López, Denise Ferreira da Silva & Arjuna Neuman, Meenakshi Thirukode / Instituting Otherwise, and Joeri Woudstra & Robbie Barrat.

A well-known experiment conducted in the 1960s, three of the stars of the television show Flipper (Sissy, Pamela, and Peter) were moved to a research laboratory on the Caribbean island of Saint Thomas. Margaret Lowe Howell moved into the facilities full-time to teach the pre-pubescent bottle nose dolphin Peter to speak English. Twice daily, she conducted lessons to teach him to enunciate the phrase ‘hello Margaret’. The ‘m’ sound proved incredibly difficult for Peter, and the experiment was soon defunded. Research priorities have since shifted to focus on the complexity of other species’ own means of communicating, rather than teaching them English.

This edition of 

. Since the attempts to make celebrity dolphins part of the anglosphere, artists and scientists have found numerous ways to approach nonhuman communication: from having sheep play Shakespeare, creating a language for the future inhabitants of Mars, to analysing the language of fossils from eras other than the Anthropocene. with contributions by Jenna Sutela, Adelaide Lala Tam & Kuang-Yi Ku, Missouri Williams, Thijs de Zeeuw and Marjanne van Helvert. 

, the London-based artistic and curatorial duo Languid Hands (comprised of Imani Robinson and Rabz Lansiquot) brought together artists, thinkers, writers, listeners and speakers, wanderers and wonderers, to explore the complexity of Black Testimony. In the exhibition space of Stroom Den Haag, Languid Hands presented their new moving image work 

Towards a Black Testimony: Prayer, Protest, Peace

From 7 september – 20 october 2019 left gallery took residence in a brick and mortar public art institution Stroom Den Haag.

left gallery is an online platform that produces and sells works of art as downloadable objects. These objects exist in limited editions, available for purchase. once purchased, buyers receive a cryptographic ‘token’ as proof of ownership. In rite of access, this token mechanism creates the conditions to access the works on display: engagement of visitors, such as purchases and social media activity operate as a stream of credit, which allow the works to remain on view. Follow left gallery on twitter or subscribe to the mailinglist, and the time to see the complete works increases; unlike its pages, and access may be denied. A purchase made through left gallery anywhere in the world extends the display of the works at stroom den haag. So long as sufficient credit remains, visitors can access all works within the project.

curated with Harm van den Dorpel and Emer M. Grant. 

In the Design Academy Eindhoven MA Critical Inquiry Lab Year 2, I am a core teacher of a course called 

“Research,” art historian Tom Holert wrote in in 2010, “is increasingly the stuff of which art is made.” In the face of information abundance and the increasing MFA-ification of the so- called creative industries, research practices of all kinds have proliferated over the past few years. But can this approach reverberate beyond the gallery walls and academic PDFs, or does it lead to “didactic overkill”? What methods are being used successfully, and what methods have not stood the test of time at this moment?

In the 24-25 academic year, the course takes the statistical problem of survivorship bias as a starting point, arguing that the information students are able find most easily is that which has been most systematically studied. How can they open new angles of inquiry, find the paths not taken, the unexpected turns, the structures taken for granted in your subject that make your subject what it is?

‘Hybrid Peace’, was a project by Vasyl Cherepanyn from Visual Culture Research Center from Kyiv. The very basic idea of a united Europe was to establish peace on the continent—where there is Europe, there is peace. In the face of technological developments in the geopolitical landscape, an ongoing hybrid war is establishing itself: How can we conceptualize a ‘hybrid peace’? Through installations, screenings and discussions, 'Hybrid Peace' explores the conditions of hybrid warfare through visual art and forensic knowledge. Over the course of seven weeks, the project will develop multiple storylines around the idea of hybrid peace.

With contributions by Hito Steyerl, Yuriy Hrytsyna, Angelina Kariakina, Oleksiy Radynski, and Artur Zmijewski. In collaboration with Movies that Matter Festival.

I was a research assistant for the field research part of the 

Shortly before dawn on 18 January 2017, police raided the Bedouin village of Umm al-Hiran, in the northern Naqab/Negev desert. During the raid, two people were killed: a villager, Yaqub Musa Abu alQi’an, and a policeman, Erez Levi.

Israeli officials described the death of Levi as a ‘terror attack’, and suggested that Abu alQi’an was connected to the terror group ISIS. But local residents and activists told a different story: police had fired at Abu alQi’an without provocation.

Since 2017, Forensic Architecture (FA) has worked with a group of documentary photographers, Activestills, to examine these claims. Our work pitted us directly against Israeli politicians and police chiefs, and exposed inconsistencies in the official account of the event, as well as mishandling of evidence after the fact.

For a few years, I taught art history & photography theory at BA level at the Photography department of the Royal Academy of Art The Hague.

 was a multimedia installation by London-based artist Lawrence Lek, scored by electronic musician Kode9 (Steve Goodman). The installation transformed Stroom‘s gallery space into a real estate marketing suite for the fictional Nøtel Corporation, Lek’s design for the luxury hotel of the future.

Rivers that are granted ‘human rights’, the legal battle over the authorship rights of a monkey, a robot judge presiding over legal cases. The exhibition and programme De Dingen (The Things) kicked of a research project addressing the changing status of ‘things' and the implications it has on human life. It was also the first exhibition I ever curated 🥰

In collaboration witth de Ambassade van de Noordzee (the embassy of the North Sea). With contributions by The Rodina, The Parliament of Things, Simon Wald-Lasowski, marjanne van Helvert and Paulina Agustoni, rkss, Swan Meat, Vectors, Rowan Wigley, Frances Bodomo, the Otolith Group, Kamile Ofoeme, Tabita Rezaire, Stine Alling Jacobsen, Erik A. de Jong, and Imara Limon. 

 was an international three-day gathering created to look closely at who "makes the present" by foregrounding the freelancer in the arts and within globalising dynamics more broadly. The symposium was organised by curators, based on experience, and encouraged the participation of artists, writers, journalists, designers among other "content producers" and freelance workers.

I was in charge of the production of the symposium. 

I translated several documents from German-English in a later stage of the investigation t

Shortly after 5:00pm on 6 April 2006, 21-year-old Halit Yozgat was murdered at the desk of his family-run internet café in Kassel, Germany. His death was the ninth of ten murders committed across Germany between 2000 and 2007, by a neo-Nazi group known as the National Socialist Underground (NSU).

It was not until 2011, however, that the NSU and their killing spree was exposed, when two members of the group committed suicide after being pursued by police from the scene of a bank robbery. In the months and years that followed, more than a dozen parliamentary inquiries and Germany’s longest post-war criminal trial would expose the shocking extent to which Germany’s security services were aware of the NSU, and in constant contact with many of its supporters.

In 2017, I assisted as a photography assistant on Ariel Caine's project 

The village of al-Araqib in the northern Naqab desert has been demolished over 170 times over the past sixty years. Israeli authorities argue that the village did not exist prior to the 1948 establishment of the state of Israel, and that as such, the Bedouin villagers are trespassers, and their settlements illegal.

For some time in 2017, I worked in Peckham Cuts Dubplate Shop, cutting vinyl dubplates for local DJ's and labels.

Finissage Really? Art and Knowledge in Time of Crisis