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Daily at 12:00 and 16:00 | free, registration at the fair (first come, first served)
During the upcoming edition, Art Rotterdam will provide daily guided tours for visitors of thefair. These offer both emerging art lovers and experienced art connoisseurs new perspectives and an insight into the diversity and highlights of the fair.
Passionate art professionals will explain, in an accessible way, the remarkable stories behindboth the artwork and the maker.
In the New Art Section of Art Rotterdam, Galleria Doris Ghetta from Italy will present a solo booth featuring the work of Shivangi Kalra. In her paintings, she invites the viewer to step into her inner world, a world that is deeply personal yet resonates with something universal. Her works can be read as concentrated studies of memory, intimacy and social relations. The New Art Section, curated by Övül Ö. Durmuşoğlu, is reserved for solo presentations by emerging artists with a compelling and conceptually thoughtful practice.
Shivangi Kalra was born in Delhi in 1998. She studied Painting at the College of Art in Delhi and graduated cum laude from the Frank Mohr Institute in Groningen in 2024, following an exchange programme at Uniarts Helsinki. That same year, she received the Royal Award for Modern Painting. She currently divides her time between Amsterdam and India, two contexts that continue to inform her work.
Kalra’s dreamlike and enigmatic paintings explore the ways in which memory and perception can become intertwined. Rather than presenting clearly defined narratives, she depicts fragmented situations in which something has just occurred or is about to unfold. Each painting seems to function as a mental space that she constructs with care, element by element, at times almost staged like a theatrical set. At the same time, she rarely makes the scene explicit. Her compositions feature interiors, terraces and subtle theatrical elements, as well as references to lavish parties that she remembers from her youth. For Kalra, these gatherings form a microcosm in which social hierarchies and ingrained codes become visible, almost like a performance. Yet it is also a space for genuine connection. She seeks to understand what takes place when people come together in such settings, a society in miniature, captured in a painting that reveals as much as it withholds.
One striking aspect of her work is the psychological charge of the spaces she depicts. Many of her scenes are set in the city where she grew up, a place that has undergone profound transformation in recent decades, as has its social landscape. Yet the city functions less as a literal backdrop than as a space of memory. Festive tables appear in seemingly warm living rooms or shift to terraces and outdoor settings. At times, a piece of furniture asserts itself with unusual insistence. Figures emerge in motion blur, appear only as an autonomous hand or as mirrored doubles, cast an ominous shadow in a corner, partially dissolve behind smoke or curtains, remain faceless or fade into their surroundings. In some works, figures are framed by a window while in others, the viewer’s gaze is obstructed by the bars of a balcony. In some paintings, people are conspicuously absent. Animals recur throughout, from shadowy dogs and table legs resembling horse legs to tiger rugs that seem to almost come alive.
Kalra guides the eye along conspicuous yet slightly unsettled sightlines and charged details, including photographs on the wall that raise more questions than they answer. One can almost sense the silences, the outward display, the underlying friction and the unspoken hierarchies. The explicit and implicit social rules and the different expectations that are assigned to men and women. It is as if you’re looking at a charged yet unstable memory that has shifted over time, governed by a logic that belongs to dreams. In the context of the Royal Award for Modern Painting, Kalra stated, “I have increasingly begun to paint from memory and have learned to embrace the confusion that can arise from it.” As a result, her works carry unsettling and melancholic undertones, while humour and a touch of absurdity offer some soft edges.
Kalra’s work was previously shown at the Groninger Museum, the Chabot Museum, the Royal Palace Amsterdam, Method in Mumbai and the Museum of Goa. Later this year, she will present a solo exhibition at the Drents Museum in Assen.
Shivangi Kalra’s presentation will be on view in the New Art Section during Art Rotterdam (27–29 March in Rotterdam Ahoy), presented by Galleria Doris Ghetta.
Written by Flor Linckens
At first glance, the colourful work of Vuyo Mabheka seems cheerful. The combination of fresh colours, naive childlike drawings and cut-out photographs is easy on the eye. But that impression does not last. With each work you see, your view evolves. You start to recognise the same photos again and again and the same drawn figures reappearing. In his photocollages, Mabheka tells what it is like to grow up as a Black person in a township in post-Apartheid South Africa. It is a highly layered and fragile story that is rarely told, one surrounded by shame and distrust.
Vuyo Mabheka’s work can be seen at Unseen Photo at the Afronova stand.
Mabheka’s series is called Popihuise, a Xhosa corruption of the Afrikaans pophuis (dollhouse). He added the ‘e’ at the end to make the word sound English. The name refers to the original function of the drawings, which were homemade toys. Mabheka used them as a board game when his younger sister brought friends home.
Vuyo Mabheka (South Africa, 1999) and his sister grew up in the township of Thokoza, just outside of Johannesburg. They had an absent father and their mother worked most of the time. At first, they lived with their grandmother, but when she died, much of the responsibility for raising his younger sister fell to Mabheka. Afronova’s Emilie Demon describes it as an unstable environment, one in which a great deal depended on the ability to improvise and the survival instincts of a minor.
The path from an unstable childhood to bricolage art was a long one. Demon lives and works in Johannesburg. In addition to her gallery, the Japanese-French curator runs the photography project Of Souls and Joy in Thokoza. Alongside a photography course, the project also offers tools to learn how to reflect on and talk about traumatic experiences. “I’ve learned a great deal over the past ten years,” Demon says by phone. “At first, the participants were distrustful. What is someone like me doing there? What does she want from us? That was the attitude. So, it took a long time to gain their trust.”
“Talking about traumatic experiences always takes time, but for Black South Africans, it is probably even more difficult. They feel unseen. That’s why I wanted to make it a safe space, a place where you could learn about photography and if you want, to talk about your traumas.”
It proved a challenge to do justice to the layered nature of the work and the original function of the drawings, Demon explains. Not only because many of the sheets are marked on both sides, but above all, because the stories they tell are extremely personal.
For instance, the father figure returns in several guises—once with the text I’m Proud at eye level, his arm draped around a cut-out photo of a five-year-old Mabheka. Elsewhere, he appears as a police officer helping a young Mabheka cross the street.
In iGumbi Lam we see Mabheka as a toddler sitting on a bed in a bedroom. Keywords are written on the wall. Whereas the inner world of the average five-year-old in a stable environment might include things like football, Pokémon, Nintendo and a pet, Mabheka’s word cloud is far grimmer: police, family, love, dad, hero, doctor. At the bottom of the image, the date is visible on an alarm clock: Fri / 13.
There are also elements that might be referred to as mythologising. In Top Zinto, a corrugated-iron shack turns into a colourful house, and in Imbali Yesizwe, a house without parents becomes a place of redemption for a nation.
To do justice to all these aspects, Mabheka and Demon chose to allow small differences between edition numbers. Each collage is therefore slightly different. The drawing remains the same each time, but the photos differ per edition because they are cut out by hand. The selection can also vary. “This approach suits the work well,” says Demon.
In 2024, Emilie Demon brought Vuyo Mabheka’s work to Paris Photo. It was an overwhelming success and the work sold out within a few days. The renowned French photobook publisher Chose Commune also published a book about the series. It changed Mabheka’s life; he recently moved into an apartment with brick walls. He now fills his days with painting and visiting museums. “Don’t stay stuck in this anger—be open and curious,” Demon advised Mabheka. That seems to be working out well. We have only seen the beginning, Demon says confidently over the phone. “His peach is so ready now.”
Written by Wouter van den Eijkel
This year marks the tenth edition of the NN Art Award. The annual incentive prize of €10,000 is awarded to a talented artist who completed their education in the Netherlands and presents work at Art Rotterdam (27–29 March at Rotterdam Ahoy). The professional jury nominated four artists: Fiona Lutjenhuis (Galerie Fleur & Wouter), Tina Farifteh (Gallery Vriend van Bavink), Mandy Franca (Night Café Gallery) and Kyra Nijskens (Prospects / Mondriaan Fonds). From 14 March to 25 May 2026, work by all nominees will be on view at Kunsthal Rotterdam.
In her multidisciplinary practice, Mandy Franca explores the friction and entanglement between the digital and the everyday. She grew up in Rotterdam-Zuid, where cultural diversity was the norm and contact with her family in Curaçao took place via a calling centre, a small shop in the 1990s and early 2000s in which you could make international phone calls for a fee. The clocks on the wall showing different time zones reflected not only physical distance but also two realities existing simultaneously. From an early age, Franca developed a keen awareness of what technology can do to proximity, memory and identity.
In her artistic practice, she examines how digitalisation, migration and globalisation shape our relationship to everyday objects, places, traditions, images, memories and domestic environments, often without us even noticing. How can these be preserved? Franca believes that the individual always points towards the collective. She seeks not only to revalue what appears ordinary and grant it additional weight, but also to consider how its experience connects to broader, shared realities. In this way, personal experiences are placed within a larger fabric of shared needs and mutual dependence. Franca pays particular attention to care, connection and the body as an archive. Our relationship with the more-than-human world also runs as a continuous thread throughout her practice.
Franca starts out with fleeting snapshots taken on her smartphone, often in low resolution as she embraces the technology that is available to her. In doing so, she refers to Hito Steyerl’s essay on the ‘poor image’ as a democratic counterpoint to the ‘perfect’ visual language of the commercial world, where circulation and accessibility outweigh technical perfection. Franca explores what digital materiality means and how an image relates to surface, reproduction and tactility. She gives form to these questions by connecting analogue and digital processes, drawing, printing and layering images to reveal a complexity in which the digital and the physical are inseparably intertwined. A tension emerges between the reproducible image and the singular gesture that transforms it into a unique work. Franca frequently experiments with different media and printing techniques. In earlier works, she combined NASA imagery with her own photography, video and sound.
Mandy Franca was born in Rotterdam in 1989. She studied at the Willem de Kooning Academy in Rotterdam and at the Royal College of Art in London, followed by a residency programme at the Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten in Amsterdam. Her work has been shown at Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, Saatchi Gallery in London and TENT Rotterdam and is included in the collections of Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam and the Rijksakademie. Her work recently appeared in the publication ‘Vitamin P4: New Perspectives in Contemporary Painting’ by Phaidon Press.
Mandy, can you tell us more about the work you are presenting at Art Rotterdam and at Kunsthal Rotterdam?
The work on view at Art Rotterdam and at Kunsthal Rotterdam forms part of a larger series I began in 2023 titled “An Area of Land Dominated by Trees”. I was inspired by the opening sentence of Wikipedia’s description of a forest. The titles function partly as descriptive, almost encyclopaedic designations, as if they were a biological registration of a moment. At the same time, several titles carry a personal charge, such as “Fluttering Leaves Make the Wind Blow”, derived from a remark by my sister-in-law, or “My Grandmother’s House as a Place of Shelter”, which is also included in the presentation at Art Rotterdam in the booth of Night Café.
I am interested in multiple realities and forms of intelligence that extend beyond the human, and I situate both contemporary technologies and the natural world within a more-than-human context. Trees are social beings capable of complex communication, challenging the notion that intelligence is exclusively human. This invites a reconsideration of our relationship to nature and to contemporary technologies, expanding our understanding of intelligence. The emphasis placed in the West on individualism underestimates the importance of community, collaboration and the recognition of our mutual dependence and shared experiences. Understanding our interconnectedness is crucial to our survival. In this work, trees do not function as a metaphor but as a community from which we as humans can learn.
The images in this series stem from my personal archive, and were taken over the past years with my iPhone in various places and at different moments in my life, including London, the Vondelpark in Amsterdam, the Kralingse Bos in Rotterdam, the grounds of the Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten and my grandmother’s house in Curaçao. This geographical and temporal layering reflects how my work comes into being, through overlaps between place, memory and present experience.
In both presentations, I consciously choose a non-hierarchical way of installing the works. They appear at different heights and extend across multiple walls, creating space for discovery and movement. No material, format or technique is subordinate to another.
My interest in community and interconnectedness is not only conceptual but also deeply personal. My parents were born in Curaçao and I grew up in Rotterdam-Zuid in a multicultural environment. My class at the Christian primary school consisted of children from diverse cultural backgrounds and each week began with prayer, each in their own way. As a child, I experienced differences in language, religion and ritual as self-evident and fascinating, it was my normal. As an adult, I became more aware of how this cultural diversity can come under pressure or meet resistance in society. For me, such cross-pollination represents a form of social intelligence. In that sense, I see a parallel with the forest. It reminds me that as a planet, humans, animals, plants and even technology are interconnected and dependent on one another.
What are your plans for 2026?
At the moment, I am working towards my first solo museum exhibition, which I am very much looking forward to. In May, my solo ‘I Breathe an Endless Universe in Me’, curated by Delany Boutkan, will open at Stedelijk Museum Schiedam. The exhibition forms an important anchor point within my practice and directly extends an ongoing line of research that began with ‘On Being Light and Liquid’ (Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten, Amsterdam, 2024) and continued in ‘Why Do I Stare at the Sky and Long for the Clouds’ (Night Café, London, 2025).
Throughout this series, clouds, air and the colour blue recur as motifs that function as connective and communal elements and that emerged after a prolonged period of illness and isolation. I lay in bed for months, staring at the sky. As even the usual activities one might turn to during illness were not an option for me, the vast sky outside my window became my connection to the world beyond. The ever-changing sky disrupted the repetitive rhythm of my days and brought moments of reflection and wonder. I reflected on the contrast between my own immobility and the fluidity of the world around me. As I observed the movement of clouds, historically a symbol of freedom, I considered how such freedom is always contextual and situation-bound. The presentation at Stedelijk Museum Schiedam includes photographic and video works taken with a mobile phone from my own archive as well as in collaboration with family members, digitally simulated imagery, painting, sound and video works. In this exhibition, I explore how presence is experienced when people, places and times are separated. Breath and air play a central role.
My work has also been included in the recently published ‘Vitamin P4: New Perspectives in Contemporary Painting’ by Phaidon Press. The ‘Vitamin’ series focuses on contemporary artists working with painting and brings together around 100 artists from across the globe who, according to the editors, have made a fresh, distinctive or innovative contribution to the genre over the past five to ten years.
In addition, several exhibitions abroad are planned for the autumn and I intend to take time mid-year to rest in Curaçao, in between projects.
Can you describe how you felt when you heard you had been nominated for the NN Art Award?
I was quite surprised. The idea of applying came from my gallerist at Night Café, who was convinced I stood a chance of being selected. The fact that she recognised that potential in my work speaks to her intuition and commitment.
The news arrived at a particular moment: a day earlier I had learned that my grandmother had passed away after a short illness. The nomination therefore stood in stark contrast to how I was feeling at the time. I felt honoured yet also somewhat astonished. At the same time, given its timing, I see the nomination as an encouragement. I am grateful and it is an honour to be one of the four nominees selected from so many submissions.
Which project would you immediately take up if you were to win the award?
Over the past years, my health has limited my ability to travel extensively. During an earlier period, I began collecting images of flowers from my personal archive. From this growing archive, I develop collages combined with oil pastel that refer to the traditional floral still life, while also revealing corporeality and fragmentation. For me, flowers embody both vulnerability and resilience. In time, I would like to travel to Curaçao to photograph and study flowers there. My parents grew up surrounded by this flora. By connecting this future archive with material I have gathered in recent years, I aim to bring together personal and geographical layers. They function as carriers of memory, presence and family history.
To explore that layering further and develop my work on a larger spatial scale, my dream is not so much to realise one specific project but to acquire a large-format printer. Printing already plays an important role in my practice, yet at present I depend on external workshops with the appropriate facilities, which requires planning well in advance. Having my own large-format printer would allow for greater spontaneity, flexibility and experimentation with materials, enabling me to broaden my practice. If I had access to this equipment in my own studio, it would not only accelerate the process but above all enrich it. It would open up possibilities for experimenting with layering, materials and combinations that currently remain out of reach. In this way, I hope to further develop my artistic practice and deepen the balance between experimentation and technical knowledge.
The winner of the NN Art Award 2026 will be announced on Friday 27 March at Kunsthal Rotterdam. During this festive evening, all exhibitions, including the NN Art Award exhibition, will be freely accessible to invited guests.
Written by Flor Linckens
Saturday, March 28, 4:00 to 5:00 PM
Stand C 01, Galerie Ron Mandos
Internationally renowned Rotterdam artist Joep van Lieshout has created an art walk in the form of a booklet, guiding you to his favourite artworks in Rotterdam that you might otherwise overlook.
This was created in collaboration with Tramhuis, the recently opened kiosk for city walks. The kiosk is an initiative of Droom en Daad and encourages Rotterdammers and visitors to explore the city on foot.
On Saturday, March 28, from 4:00 to 5:00 PM, the booklet (€12.90) will be available for purchase at the fair, where Joep van Lieshout will be present to sign copies.
Art Rotterdam / Unseen Photo collaborates with We Are Public. Cultural optimists who strivefor more art and culture in the Netherlands. Did you know you can also become a member? With We Are Public, you attend a curated selection of culture; carefully chosen by We Are Public curators. Often free, sometimes with a substantial discount. With the bonus, of course, that you support art and culture! Will you become a member too? Get your first month free now: www.wearepublic.nl
Internationally renowned visual artist Otobong Nkanga presents a new artwork during Art Rotterdam 2026 at the booth of Lumen Travo (Amsterdam) in the main section of the art fair.
A common thread throughout her multidisciplinary practice is both earthing and unearthing: a horizontal grounding in the entanglement of human existence with natural elements, a physical contact with material realities, and a poetic effort to unearth and heal mutilated landscapes and seascapes. Her work reveals the consequences of humankind’s occupation, exploitation and spoliation of these very elements. And so in her work rivers flow through skies or run like veins through bodies, ropes resemble braided strands of hair bound together, golden textile streams trickle down like the tears of a waterfall.
Her textile works, paintings, drawings, performances, installations and videowork frequently address unequal cultural, economic and ecological exchanges between North and South, with particular attention to their impact on African countries. Nkanga lives and works in Antwerp, Belgium, but was born in Nigeria, a West African country that was under British colonial rule until gaining independence in 1960.
Trade routes
Nkanga is particularly interested in tracing ancient and contemporary trade routes of minerals, spices, herbs and oils, and the stories attached to their circulation. From the nineteenth century onwards, mining expanded rapidly across continents, leaving deep scars in the landscape and demanding physically taxing labour that resulted in a high human toll. In this context, earth appears as ancient and fundamental to humanity, while also dispersed, violated and distorted.
Weaving these links to raw materials into her work, they become tools for a poetic exploration of natural landscapes. In doing so, Nkanga reactivates former trade routes between South and North, while also addressing damage, loss and making attempts at repair. Her oeuvre unfolds as a cyclical narrative in which growth, exchange, decay and death lead to transformation and regeneration. These storylines engage all the senses, including smell: for example the sharpness of pink pepper or the deep, sweet warmth of raw cacao beans. In doing so, she also subtly activates memories whose fragments linger in the present.
Unearthed, 2021
Textile plays a key role within this framework. Threads are woven together, allowing personal and collective stories to intersect. Weaving becomes a social act, based on shared contribution to a final result. A telling example is the tapestry series Unearthed (2021), which the late curator Koyo Kouoh described as “the unsung tales of the earth.” For this series, Nkanga worked with twelve different types of yarn, producing approximately 250 colours across four tapestries, Abyss, Midnight, Twilight and Sunlight, which together form a single narrative. They depict different sea levels and stages of mineral extraction, first by hand and later by machine. In these underwater worlds, anemones transform into human limbs, yarns glimmer like dumped plastic waste, and mechanical excavation arms appear to float in the endless depths of the sea. The body parts refer to the many people lost at sea, whose bodies merge with the water and turn into minerals, allowing the cycle of life to continue.
Cadence, 2024
Another impressive recent textile installation is Cadence (2024), commissioned for the atrium of MoMA, the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The work unfolds vertically through the space and uses the architecture itself as part of the installation. It is structured around the idea of a fall, like the cadence of a teardrop trickling through space. Cadencebrings together decay, mining, labour, water, plants, heat and light, showing how the underworld, the earth, the sun and outer space collapse into one another. Through layered weaving, sculptural handmade textile forms, and sound, Nkanga translates the constant rhythm of natural elements into a single continuous cadence of life.
The artist is currently showing a major retrospective at the Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris, running until 22 February 2026. She is also preparing new commissions for the 61st Venice Biennale and for the opening of the new KANAL Centre Pompidou in Brussels, soon to be the largest museum of contemporary art in Europe. Within this international trajectory, Art Rotterdam is the first stop where her latest work can be explored in the booth of Lumen Travo.
Bio
Otobong Nkanga’s practice explores the notion of land as a place of non-belonging and provides alternative meanings to the social ideas of identity. Paradoxically, she brings to light the memories and historical impacts provoked by humans and nature. A selection of recent solo exhibitions includes I Dreamt of You in Colours, Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris, Paris (runs until 22 February 2026), Each Seed a Body, Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas (TX) (2025), Cadence, The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York (2024), and Craving for Southern Light, IVAM Centre Julio González, Valencia (2023). A selection of recent group exhibitions includes Project a Black Planet, MACBA Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona, Barcelona (2025), Magical Realism, WIELS centre d’art contemporain, Brussels (2025), and Blue Zone, Kunsthal Rotterdam, Rotterdam (2025). Otobong Nkanga has received several major awards, including the Nasher Prize (2025) and the Zeitz MOCAA Award for Artistic Excellence (2025).
Written by Emily van Driessen
“And yet a strange beauty remains,
a memory of that moment
in which everything stopped, paused,
to begin anew,
like a heart faltering
but still determined to live.
I’ve always remember the wires of the laundry hanging
outside in the countryside,
so many worlds have passed
through those folds,
suspended,
the smell of the soap,
the warmth of the sun,
If death is a state of being
what would become of memories?
Do they linger in the air?
or do they dissolve in the tide?” – Silvia Gatti
Evaporative poetic words light up the screen in the multichannel sound installation Chiaro di Luna, 2025 (Moonlight) by visual artist Silvia Gatti. The videowork is presented in the Projections section at Art Rotterdam, on the proposal of andriesse-eyck gallery. Its visual language consists of fragmented footage of nature (recorded in National Park De Hoge Veluwe), computer-generated imagery, encrypted codes, and an experimental poetic framework.
Silvia Gatti (1983, Italy; lives and works in Amsterdam) creates video and sound installations, writes poetry, develops computer programs, and makes conceptual sculptural works. Her practice is multidisciplinary and research-based and regards working with language and storytelling as a form of ‘concrete philosophy’: “I have always been drawn to fundamental questions either scientific, philosophical, or metaphysical,” says Gatti. “They allow me to reflect on what knowledge is, what human intelligence means today, and how we perceive the world around us. I use art as a way to concretely approach these questions to fragment them and to move closer to their essence.
Storytelling connects me to the nature of memory and to the construction of possible futures. It is a tool I use to make abstract concepts tangible and experientially accessible, whether through remembrance or future projection, so they can be engaged with not only intellectually, but also socially and existentially.”
In Chiaro di Luna, 2025, Gatti imagines decoding nature from inside a bunker that is completely absorbed into the architecture of the surrounding landscape. The bunker, a massive and imposing architectural construction that serves as a structure of protection in times of war, also functioned as a hidden site for communication. In the very bunker where Gatti recorded the videowork, an Enigma machine was once installed: an encryption device resembling a small typewriter in a wooden case, used to encode and decode military messages. It became most famous for its use by Nazi Germany during World War II.
However, even from within the safety of its thick concrete walls, signals still had to be able to pass through: “The Enigma machine was still receiving information from the sky within the structure of the bunker. It had to be open and exposed in some way to receive these messages from the outside world in order for the machine to be able to decode and translate them.” This concept intrigued Gatti immensely and became the conceptual point of departure for Chiaro di Luna.
“I asked myself: what does it mean to be protected? What does it mean to be exposed? And how do we connect with others and with the world surrounding us?” Gatti explains. “Also the network and logic of the Enigma machine that breaks information down into something understandable really intrigued me in relation to my practice working with programming and poetry.”
In the videowork, nature becomes mechanised, and the program tirelessly decodes what is embedded within it. “I wrote a poetic text, and the program breaks the language into signals, basically revealing what nature is trying to tell us. I wanted to blur the boundaries between nature and the interior of the bunker itself, as if breaking down the walls in order to work directly with nature and move within it.”
Next to the video installation, there is also a sculpture made from discarded old clocks. “I opened them up so that you can see the exposed moving gears and hear the ticking of time. The sound of their rotors also reminded me of the sounds Enigma machines make when breaking codes.”
Explore the immersive electronic and visual experience Chiaro di Luna, 2025 in the section of Projections at Art Rotterdam.
Bio
Silvia Gatti (b. 1983, Alessandria, Italy; lives and works in Amsterdam) is a contemporary artist whose practice draws on various disciplines, ranging from architecture to video and sound installation, poetry, sculpture, programming, and conceptual works on paper, exploring the intersections of language, technology and nature.
Before graduating cum laude from the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam in 2021, Gatti obtained her MA in Architecture, Design and Urban Planning from the University of Architecture in Genoa, Italy. From 2023 to 2025, Gatti was a resident artist at the Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten in Amsterdam.
She has been shown both in The Netherlands and internationally (Italy) and her recent highlights include the group exhibition at the Diogenes Bunker in Arnhem (2025) and her selection and participation for Art Directions exhibition at the International Film Festival Rotterdam 2026, reflecting her engagement with experimental, immersive, and interdisciplinary media installation.
In 2019, Silvia Gatti won First Prize in the Lassnigbeme Contest, organised by the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, with her series of drawings titled ON PLACEBO EFFECT.
Written by Emily van Driessen
Entering the world of Argentine visual artist Hernán Soriano (1978) feels close to stepping into an archival study lined with cabinets of curiosities. The muted scent of old books creaks in silence, dim amber candlelight washes over brown-tinged paper, and a large coloured world map lies half-unrolled across a solid oak desk.
In the New Art Section at the booth of Quimera Galería (based in Buenos Aires) Hernán Soriano presents a selection of works from different periods in his practice. He describes his artistic method as ‘thinking with his hands’, as he folds, cuts, assembles, rips, traces and reimagines what elements of the past might become in the present. He links his craftsmanship directly to the studio, a place to ponder before setting things in motion. The works on view at the fair form part of what he considers an ‘organised system’, one to which he repeatedly returns, reactivating familiar motifs and introducing them into new constellations.
His delicate and precise practice, often consisting of cut-outs from archival paper materials, evokes elements of a revenant ancient world in which art and science were more seamlessly intertwined, and colonial expeditions were undertaken with the use and refinement of cartography. Through his artistic interventions, a multitude of contemporary readings emerges, not least in his subtle play with materials and his nuanced engagement with language.
In Nuestra Flor (2021), a globe is split open into a flourishing flower. La flor (flower in English) resonates almost instinctively with the feminine genesis of life, a meaning subtly embedded in the word itself, which can also, in veiled form, allude to the vulva. In La Laguna (2017), a map, a flat surface, but also a lagoon, a shallow body of water, is folded into three dimensions, acquiring a bodily presence. At the same time, Soriano cuts the form out of the map itself. The title equally evokes the Spanish expression una laguna mental, a temporary lapse of memory, while materially inscribing that very missing fragment into the surface of the map.
The artist notes that living in Argentina, a South American country marked by strong European cultural influences, has shaped much of his perspective, as well as his relationship to materials and the way he approaches their exploration.
In this respect, his artworks incorporating avocado pits are particularly compelling. He carves into the pit, the heart of the fruit, shaping it into innumerable organic forms until it becomes almost unrecognisable. The avocado pit is an element we often overlook, yet it possesses remarkable aesthetic qualities: a warm amber-brown hue and a wood-like texture. In a distinctly material way, it links the ephemeral, that which decays, to the passage of history.
In El Comienzo de la Alborada (2025), organically rounded cut-outs of the avocado pit twirl across sheet music like musical notes. La alborada means dawn in Spanish; it is as if the artist composes a melody of morning glory, where nature becomes musically illustrated.
At the same time, the avocado is an important indigenous product of Latin America and the word “avocado” itself carries multiple layers of indigenous regional identity. There was an avocado tree in his family home where he grew up, making the fruit an element closely tied to his personal and emotional history.
In the titles of several artworks in which Soriano carves elements from avocado pits, he introduces the neologism páltico (with the feminine form páltica), a term he has coined himself, derived from palta (avocado). Just as herbalists, botanists and naturalists once had to invent or adapt new words from other languages to classify flowers, plants or animals, Soriano similarly forges a new term within the Spanish language. It is as if he creates his own taxonomy within his artistic register.
Step into Soriano’s layered world at Art Rotterdam 2026, on view with Quimera Galería in The New Art Section.
Bio
Hernán Soriano (1978, Buenos Aires, Argentine) is a visual artist whose work moves between drawing, sculpture, and the construction of artifacts using accumulated materials and obsolete technologies. One of the most significant milestones in his career was the solo exhibition Formar mentalmente una máquina at the Museo de Arte Moderno de Buenos Aires (October 26, 2016 – February 19, 2017), where he intervened antique books and lithographs as landscapes of memory and poetic repetition.
In 2022, he received the Premio Azcuy de Arte Contemporáneo for the project Sonos, a permanent sound-sculpture installation located in the Donna Magna building, selected from more than 200 national proposals. His work has been recognized for integrating sound, materiality, and active audience participation, and he has taken part in important group exhibitions such as the 23rd Stuttgarter Filmwinter Festival (Germany) and Museo de los mundos imaginarios at Museo MAR.
Written by Emily van Driessen
In the section The Past Present at Unseen, THIS IS NOT A WHITE CUBE (Lisbon) will presents the series “BLOOM: Reclaiming Presence Through Botanical and Photographic Memory” by Dagmar van Weeghel. With this body of work, the Dutch photographer returns to the nineteenth century to question the very foundations of the photographic archive. Who was recorded at the time, who remained outside the frame, and what does that mean for the ways in which we look today?
Van Weeghel studied at the Dutch Film Academy in Amsterdam and lived and worked for some ten years in several African countries as a filmmaker, including Zimbabwe, Tanzania, Botswana, Uganda and South Africa. Those years shaped her gaze. Since 2015, photography has been her primary medium, through which she shares stories unfolding between continents, generations and histories. Her practice operates at the intersection of image and archive.
A decisive turning point came with her return to the Netherlands. She witnessed firsthand how persistent prejudices about Africa and African people can be. Her husband, whom she had met in Botswana, was often cast as ‘the other’, and her two children, growing up with a dual identity, also encountered racism. Van Weeghel immersed herself in history in order to understand how such patterns take root. She read, among other works, Edward Said’s seminal ‘Orientalism’, which systematically demonstrated how the Western gaze is not neutral but shaped by power structures and colonial systems of knowledge. That gaze exoticises, categorises and marginalises whatever is defined as ‘other’, presenting it as self-evident and objective reality. What her husband and children experienced was not an exception but a pattern, deeply embedded in Western thought.
Said is regarded as one of the founders of postcolonialism, an academic field that examines how colonial structures, modes of thinking and representations persist after the formal end of colonial rule. Decolonial thinking takes this further by actively seeking to dismantle those structures and develop alternative perspectives and systems of knowledge, often originating in the Global South. Think of theorists such as Frantz Fanon. Within these frameworks, Van Weeghel finds her own position. Between 2016 and 2022 she created the series “Diaspora”, for which she portrayed African immigrants in Europe, often people from her own network. In it, she explored how dignity, strength and complexity can be rendered visible within a visual culture that has long been dominated by a Western perspective.
Gradually her attention shifted to nineteenth-century photography and the structural absence of Black Europeans within it. During that period, photography developed into a mass medium and was deployed as an instrument of registration and classification. Between roughly 1839 and 1900, portraits of people of colour in European archives are rare, anonymous or entirely absent, especially when it comes to women. This scarcity is no coincidence but the symptom of a selective gaze. What did not fit the dominant frame was scarcely recorded, if at all. That lacuna lies at the heart of “BLOOM”. Rather than merely citing the archive, Van Weeghel constructs an alternative visual memory. Earlier research had already led her to historical figures such as Sarah Forbes Bonetta, a West African woman who unwillingly became a protégée of Queen Victoria, yet in “BLOOM” the emphasis shifts decisively to the present.
For “BLOOM”, a project developed over four years, Van Weeghel employs historical techniques. Yet contemporary women step into a nineteenth-century frame here. Not as curiosities but as protagonists. Using a rare carte de visite camera from 1860, the artist creates portraits of women of African descent who live in Europe today.
Van Weeghel: “Only five of these original cameras still exist, four of which are held in museum collections. One of the remaining cameras is part of the collection of the collector Frédéric Hoch in Strasbourg. He granted me permission to use this wet plate camera. Quite remarkable! In the early nineteenth century, this camera predominantly captured white subjects. We were given five hours, and the camera had likely not been used for 150 years, so it squeaked and creaked, but the process was truly extraordinary.”
The women in the photographs wear carefully crafted garments in nineteenth-century style, with every detail thoughtfully considered. Each photograph is printed on authentic nineteenth-century albumen paper and presented as a carte de visite, the small portrait card mounted on cardboard that was widely exchanged and collected in the nineteenth century.
Within the series, Van Weeghel also produces large-scale anthotypes, prints created by exposing pigments (made from self-grown and foraged wildflowers) to sunlight. These pigments gradually fade, serving as a metaphor for memory, loss and the fragility of the archive. At the same time, the artist invokes Victorian floriography, the coded language of flowers through which emotions and social conventions were communicated and which also carried colonial and racial meanings. For these anthotypes the artist reprints anonymous Black women from nineteenth-century archives. The ephemerality of the technique mirrors the ways in which these women have disappeared from historical narratives. For the pigments she collected flower petals in the Netherlands, France and the United Kingdom, countries with charged colonial histories. She often did so together with her daughter, as a shared act. Van Weeghel also gathered flowers from the private gardens of Queen Victoria and Queen Elizabeth in Scotland. These will also be on view at Unseen. In addition, Van Weeghel hand-coloured a number of black-and-white portraits as an act of remembrance, using self-made flower pigments. The flowers she employs here also carry specific meanings and messages.
All the portraits in the series continuously seek a dialogue with the viewer through the language of floriography and botanical history. Through gestures, specific flowers held by the sitters or hand-painted fabrics, each image conveys a distinct message.
Van Weeghel also works with platinum-palladium prints, a technique she selected for its durability and rich tonal range, and thus for its archival permanence. That way, these women are granted a lasting place within the visual archive. Works from the series have entered collections including the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Fondation Blachère. A selection from “BLOOM” will be on view at Unseen during Art Rotterdam in the section The Past Present. Works from the series are simultaneously presented at THIS IS NOT A WHITE CUBE in Lisbon.
These portraits do not reconstruct the past but anchor new forms of presence within the visual vocabulary of European history. With this series, Van Weeghel consciously enters a charged visual domain, fully aware of the structures that have shaped our field of vision. She adopts the form but not the power relations embedded within them. She places other bodies, stories and perspectives at the centre of the image and grants the portrayed women agency over their representation. Van Weeghel does not speak on their behalf but examines the visual frameworks that have long constrained their visibility and creates space and context for a layered presence. These women are not passive objects of a western gaze but rather co-authors. By reactivating and repositioning historical techniques, Van Weeghel expands the archive and, with it, our way of seeing. She underscores that the archive is not a neutral repository but a construct shaped by selection, exclusion and power, revealing how deeply visibility depends on who looks and who preserves.
About the section The Past Present at Unseen during Art Rotterdam (27–29 March at Rotterdam Ahoy) In The Past Present, photo historian, curator and author Hedy van Erp offers a contemporary perspective on analogue photography up to the year 2000, with particular attention to lost archives and found images. She brings togethWer artists who use existing photographic material and techniques in new ways, to restore weight and meaning to the past.
Written by Flor Linckens
