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The Unseen Book Market is one of the most beloved parts of Unseen and this year it moves to a new home. Running alongside Unseen Photo Fair as part of Art Rotterdam (27-29 March in Rotterdam Ahoy), the Book Market takes place at the Nederlands Fotomuseum, which recently reopened in Pakhuis Santos, a national monument in the Katendrecht neighbourhood.
In the museum’s entrance hall, around 35 publishers and specialist booksellers will present their latest and finest photography publications, among them Fw:Books, Kehrer Verlag and Hannibal Books, as well as academic institutions including the Willem de Kooning Academy and the Royal Academy of Art The Hague (KABK). This year the Unseen Book Market has a particularly international character, with participants from China, Switzerland, Japan, the United Kingdom, France, Ukraine, Germany, Belgium, Italy and Poland.
New releases are expected from photographers including Ruth van Beek, Robin de Puy, Anton Corbijn and Stephan Vanfleteren. Several participants will host signing sessions, offering you the chance to take home a truly special edition. Further details will follow. Admission to the Unseen Book Market is free.
What makes the Unseen Book Market so beloved is the direct encounter with the book as object. Photography books offer a relatively accessible way to collect photography: a book is often the first and most approachable entry point into an artist’s practice, and many function as collectibles in their own right. First editions, and signed copies in particular, can increase considerably in value. More importantly, you are supporting photographers and independent publishers in a direct way. And in a single room, you gain a remarkably broad view of international developments, expanding both your knowledge and your frame of reference.
The Nederlands Fotomuseum is simultaneously presenting three exhibitions, each offering its own perspective on what photography can be. The ‘Gallery of Honour of Dutch Photography’ illuminates the breadth of the national photographic heritage. ‘Awakening in Blue’ is an ode to the cyanotype, one of the oldest photographic techniques in the world, in which iron salts and UV light produce prints in a deep Prussian blue. And ‘Rotterdam in Focus’ brings together 180 years of urban photography in more than three hundred images, from an early photograph taken in 1843 to contemporary drone panoramas. Admission to these exhibitions is not included in a visit to the Unseen Book Market.
Written by Flor Linckens
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 the recent work of Kyra Nijskens, biofouling forms an important thread: the process by which marine organisms such as oysters, mussels and algae attach themselves to artificial surfaces like ship hulls and underwater pipelines. These organisms travel unnoticed along global trade routes and settle in ecosystems that are not designed to accommodate them. Conversely, the artificial infrastructures themselves, ships, containers and subsea constructions, were never intended to become habitats for such life forms. The language used to describe this is striking. Within capitalist frameworks, these species are quickly labelled colonisers or invasive, while in their original environments, they carry names such as ‘lucky clam’ or ‘golden clam’. What the logistics industry defines as a technical problem, Nijskens reads as a form of resistance. In her sculptures and installations, she examines the friction between industrial systems and the organisms that force themselves into them. Human systems disrupt and reshape ecological processes, which in turn adapt, transform and survive. Nijskens turns this dynamic into a compelling metaphor, shifting the perspective so that the organism, rather than the system, takes centre stage.
By highlighting biofouling, Nijskens shows how natural processes embed themselves in the margins of human-designed systems. At the same time, more than a thousand sea containers disappear into the ocean each year. Plastic products from lost cargo washing ashore are visible symptoms of an unsustainable system. Two parallel movements converge here: the biological and the economic, meeting on the surface of the sea. Her installations suggest a world in which human control proves relative and in which life, even within tightly organised systems, remains resilient and ultimately finds its own course.
Nijskens’ practice operates at the intersection of sculpture, installation and conceptual research. As she explains: “In my practice, I’m less interested in representing nature and more interested in working alongside it— finding moments where its patterns can challenge or disrupt the narratives we have told ourselves about what is ours and what is not. My approach is a mix of poetic reflection and critical exploration, focusing on how human activity reshapes ecological and cultural landscapes.”
During her residency at PADA Studios in late 2024 in Barreiro, Portugal, a historic departure point for early colonial expeditions, she developed the series “The Thief of Tides”. From this context she traced the routes of organisms that travelled aboard ships and wrote texts from their perspective. Shells found on the nearby beach were brought together into what she describes as hybrid technofossils, fossils of a future era that feel both biological and industrial.
Material plays a key role in her work. Nijskens combines found and new materials such as mother-of-pearl, resin, rust, textiles, plexiglass, rope, powdered blood, metal and both real and artificial pearls. She experiments with bio-resin and investigates how natural structures can be bent, combined or transformed into new forms. For her earlier installation “Rusted Mouths, Hollow Veins”, she chemically bent mother-of-pearl shells into a substance that approaches natural fibreglass.
Kyra, could you tell us more about the work you are presenting at Art Rotterdam and at Kunsthal Rotterdam?
Both at Kunsthal Rotterdam and in the Prospects section at Art Rotterdam, I will present work from “The Thief of Tides”, a project I started in 2024 during my residency in Portugal, close to the sea and an abandoned industrial area. I took long walks there and encountered industrial surfaces overgrown with shellfish. That is when I became fascinated by biofouling. Biofouling literally means biological contamination, a term I find somewhat paradoxical because somehow, biological carries a negative connotation here. It is often seen as a problem or inefficiency, yet I consider it poetic how life continues to manifest in places designed to exclude it. For me, biofouling is about bodies that do not fit, yet still persist. It is about presence as a form of queer resistance, visible in the frayed edges of global systems.
I follow these journeys and try to imagine what they look like from the perspective of the organisms themselves. In poetic texts written from their point of view, I give them a voice and describe how they cling and disrupt. From this research, the “Clogged Pipe” sculptures emerged, in which I imagine what becomes visible when a pipeline is cut open and these organisms appear inside. From that same line of thought, I began exploring other leaks within global logistics systems. Each year, thousands of sea containers are lost in the ocean, often with absurd and almost mythical consequences. Sometimes their contents resurface years later: beaches covered in Crocs, yellow rubber ducks carried along ocean currents, some frozen for years in Arctic ice. This forms the basis for new work. For this series, I use a backpack as a miniature container, an apparently sunken human object filled with sea organisms and remnants of lost cargo. Cut into segments, the backpack becomes a hybrid technofossil, an object in which economy and ecology, decay and survival converge. Work from these two most recent series will also be shown in the Prospects section of the Mondriaan Fund at Art Rotterdam.
What are your plans for 2026?
In 2026, I will take up a residency in Ebeltoft, a small historic town on the Danish coast. It is a place where the sea is close by and where centuries of trade, shipping and interventions in the landscape remain tangible. I intend to conduct extensive field research there, gather materials, study underwater structures, develop new sculptural forms and above all: respond to what I encounter.
At the same time, I hope to make a film there: an experimental, alternative narrative about hybrid bodies, sea voices and mermaids who lose their voices by conforming to the norm. I see this film as an intuitive and complementary addition to my sculptural work, an exploration of voice, silence and what is lost when one attempts to fit in. It would be wonderful to use my sculptures within this context and create a world of my own.
How did you feel when you heard you had been nominated for the NN Art Award?
I was genuinely surprised and above all: very happy. I have followed this award for years and many artists I admire were previously nominated. I also consider this year’s nominees incredibly strong. Being nominated myself makes me feel that my work is being seen and appreciated, which is of course a great compliment. It is especially meaningful to present my work at Kunsthal Rotterdam. I have lived in Rotterdam for many years and the harbour has become part of the way I work and think. Showing my work here feels really fitting.
Which project would you immediately pursue if you were to win the award?
If I were to win the award, I would immediately begin the experimental short film I have been thinking about for some time. Film is new to me, which makes it exciting. I am always searching for new media and ways to experiment, and this project would allow me to apply my knowledge of materials in an entirely different way, within the framework of film. I usually work alone, but film requires collaboration, and that seems both exciting and instructive. The award would above all give me the space to fully explore this experiment and bring it to life.
Kyra Nijskens was born in 1997 in Ulestraten. She studied Fine Art at HKU and completed her Master’s degree at the Piet Zwart Institute in Rotterdam. Her work was previously shown at Marres, MaMA, Het HEM and Museum Villa Mondriaan.
During Art Rotterdam, Nijskens’ work will be presented in the Prospects section of the Mondriaan Fund, where the public can encounter a new generation of artists. In this fourteenth edition, the exhibition presents work by 92 emerging artists who received financial support in 2024 through the Artist Start grant scheme, to support the beginning of their careers. The exhibition is curated by Johan Gustavsson and Daphne Verberg.
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
How do you mould materials with the same sensibility with which you morph words into writing? The research-driven practice of visual artist Gloriya Avgust (1993, Bulgaria) moves between text, sculpture and performance in which the materiality of language is approached in an explicitly corporeal way.
Avgust is an avid reader and deeply interested in feminist theory. The female voice as a subject of research and the ways in which women have systematically been muted throughout history speak innumerably to her. Writers like Audre Lorde, Anne Boyer and Gloria Anzaldúa are among the many prolific voices that have fed her artistic practice. “I saw how vulnerable and muted women can become inside extractive systems that do not truly care about their bodies. That brought me to feminist writers who had already lived those experiences.” This research is never directly addressed, but rather permeates her work.
Avgust received her MFA from Sint-Lucas Antwerp in 2021 and from the Piet Zwart Institute Rotterdam in 2023. She is one of the 92 emerging artists who recently received an Artist Start grant from the Mondriaan Fund, which enabled her to undertake a residency in Bulgaria. This inspired her latest artwork Performing a State of Permanence (2026), a ceramic installation that will be exhibited in the Prospects section of Art Rotterdam.
Embodied Text and Gestures
Vrouwenproblemen: Spinning the Mechanisms of Troublemaking (2025) is a strong example of her multifaceted and intersectional practice. The performance is developed together with Andrea Celeste La Forgia, a visual artist who is also exhibiting in the Prospects section of the fair. Conceptually, the work departs from two research lines that converge in one polyphonic translation.
“I’ve always had an affinity with language,” Avgust explains. “And often my writing builds the physical work where it is performed or embodied in choreographic gestures.” The movements of the performance are informed by The Weaver Speak, a hidden nonverbal language that women in the Textiel factory in Tilburg developed to communicate in secret. The script in the performance becomes a mix of archival elements and speculative forms of writing.
Avgust and Celeste La Forgia also researched Spinhuis in Amsterdam, which was the first reformatory institution and prison for women run by women. What initially appeared revolutionary in protecting women from abuse in mixed prisons ultimately housed another kind of abuse. “The women were taught how to spin wool and were basically practising free labour. During the weekends, the bourgeois visited them as if they were some kind of attraction,” Avgust says.
Another telling example of her performative practice is Slippages Of The Mouth (2025), which was also a collaboration with Andrea Celeste La Forgia. The visuals of the performance draw on the photographic archive of the controversial French neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot, who researched hysteria, a diagnosis applied almost exclusively to women. Charcot organised public demonstrations in which patients had to stage their ‘hysterical attacks’. These sessions were photographed, and since photography at the time still required long exposure times, the women had to hold these theatrical poses for extended durations.
Performing a State of Permanence
Performing a State of Permanence (2026) is still in development and will be exhibited at Prospects.
The ceramic work further builds on the motif of rupture that runs through Avgust’s practice. An ambiguous opening that at once holds a linguistic rupture, a physical incisional gesture, and a projection of violent beasthood onto the female body.
“Sappho, an Ancient Greek queer poet whose work survives only in fragments, really inspired my ceramic work. So much of her writing exists in bits and pieces, with lines missing or broken off. I think this is such a beautiful visual representation of the ripping of language, of stanzas, of meaning. And I wanted to physically translate that ripping into ceramics. The opening might be a mouth with a tongue and throat, but it could very well also look like a vagina and uterine wall. I’m intrigued by the theatricality of something that can open and close, that can reveal, conceal, threaten, mystify, where it has the potential to become a kind of stage.”
The image of the mouth as devouring organ folds back onto Charcot’s photography, where women’s bodies were staged as sites of hysterical animalistic excess. Avgust puts sharp rows of tin teeth in the hole as if an abstract monstrous creature is living inside.
The Voice of Glass
During her artist residency in Bulgaria, Avgust delved deep into spiritual rituals with pagan roots. “What I noticed is that much of that knowledge hasn’t been properly documented or archived, because a lot is transmitted by word of mouth and through songs,” she says. One ritual in particular stood out. “It was believed in Ancient Greece that the female voice was so cacophonous and piercing that when women gathered and wailed in the streets, it could open a portal to the underworld.” The practice was eventually banned because it was considered ugly and too disruptive. Yet similar traditions can still be found in Bulgaria and other Eastern- and Southern European countries, though they are also regarded as excessive.
From a patriarchal perspective, female togetherness is often framed as harmless or joyful, while anything that deviates from those expectations is quickly labelled disorderly. “Yet many of these rituals stemmed from collective grief and shared suffering, ” Avgust explains.
She links this lineage of thinking to Anne Carson’s essay The Gender of Sound in her book Glass, Irony and God. Carson observes how the female voice has historically been disciplined in tone, volume and emotional range and reflects on glass as a material that holds that tension: through glass one can see or hear someone, and still keep them at a distance.
It feels almost uncanny when Avgust mentions that the Bulgarian word for voice phonetically overlaps with “glass” in English. A serendipitous coincidence that will undoubtedly continue to inspire her practice where language and materials symbiotically feed one another.
Discover her newest work Performing a State of Permanence (2026) at the Prospects section of Art Rotterdam.
Written by Emily van Driessen
What do our ancestors tell us, and what do we ourselves wish to pass on to future generations? These are the questions that occupy the artist Samboleap Tol (b. 1990, the Netherlands) and that materialise within her visual practice. She is one of the 92 emerging artists who recently received an artist start grant from the Mondriaan Fund, and also received a residency grant. With this support, she developed Dharma Songs (2023), Cosmic Tortoise (2024) and Starlight (2025). This latest work, a new kinetic sculpture that builds on her research into ancestral veneration, is presented in the Prospects section of Art Rotterdam 2026.
Samboleap grew up in the Netherlands with Cambodian parents who lived through the genocide under the Khmer Rouge. Her family history is at once deeply rooted in the broader history of the Cambodian community, marked by untold stories and unresolved trauma. She experienced how this background shaped her own life and noticed that peers from various communities across the Global South struggled with similar unanswered questions.
Her artistic practice departs from the community and ultimately returns to it. Through extensive conversations with people, she gathers insights into shared rituals, cultural customs and mythological origins that have gradually faded into the background. She then unravels these references in kinetic sculptures.
“I think that as a child, I mainly encountered art through the community,” Samboleap explains. “Uncles and aunts putting on costumes and, through dance or theatre, telling a mythological story. I do not associate art so much with objects in a sterile, static museum with a single grand author and one-way communication. In my experience, art is alive. It has a rhythm, a narrative. And that narrative adapts to where we are.”
This sense of vitality is also reflected formally. In addition to being interactive and communicative, her sculptures are often mechanical and musical. She draws inspiration from her father, an engineer whose inventions filled the living space, and from music, which during her formative years took her by the hand like a companion.
In that same spirit, Samboleap Tol describes how celebrations and commemorations within her community were a natural part of her life from an early age and now permeate her work. For instance, the dead are remembered by preparing food for them, and temples are honoured by placing flowers there. At the same time, there was an underlying awareness that these rituals were not always explained and that traumatic histories were not addressed. “As a child, your parents are a reflection of yourself. You use them very much as a mirror. But if you only receive part of the story, that is harmful to your health.”
This absence was gradually, in part, filled by friends and mentors who had grown up with similar silences. From that search emerged Dharma Songs (2023), a series of interactive sound installations. “You are invited to place flowers in the water. At that moment, voices begin to speak from a hidden loudspeaker. I asked close friends and family members from diverse cultural backgrounds to respond to a question: if you could ask or tell your ancestors one last thing, what would it be?” The sculpture draws on a shared cultural heritage of ancestral veneration and offers space for the generational lack of connection with ancestors.
Thanks to the support of the Mondriaan Fund, Samboleap was given the opportunity to further explore her roots and to broaden her practice geographically and historically. She explains how she has always strongly associated herself with the Indonesian diasporas in the Netherlands, which felt to her like a parallel world. This led her to Yogyakarta, where conversations with historians increasingly clarified how closely the historical lines between Java and Cambodia are intertwined. “They refer to this as Purāṇic motifs, derived from the Purāṇas, ancient Indian mythological texts. From around the 5th to the 15th century, India exerted a tremendous influence on both Java and Cambodia, which remains visible in temples and palpable in cultural practices, despite the fact that neither place has practised Hinduism for over 500 years. We are both proud of the great temples in our back gardens, yet we actually know too little about their origins and motifs,” she explains. Samboleap now shares this accumulated knowledge through lecture performances, research articles and her visual work.
In Cosmic Tortoise (2024), Samboleap Tol returns to a myth in which the divine figure Vishnu assumes the form of a tortoise. The sculpture was created in collaboration with a large network of makers and cultural researchers with whom she has continued to work since her stay in Yogyakarta. “There were around forty people involved. I speak little Indonesian, and they often do not speak English. So it was often a matter of explaining things with hands and feet,” she laughs. The result is a mechanically moving tortoise made of teak wood. “When you press a button, the shell lifts up and a book appears that opens along a vertical line, while a voice begins to sing. I wrote the text for the book myself and had it translated by translators in Cambodia, into Khmer.”
In the Prospects section of Art Rotterdam, Samboleap Tol presents her latest work Starlight (2025), which likewise emerged from an intensive collaborative process involving dozens of skilled practitioners. The central element of the kinetic sculpture consists of wood engravings, made in collaboration with a teak wood carver from Jepara, North Java, a city with a long tradition of woodcarving shaped by Indianisation, Islamisation and also Dutch influence.
The origin of Starlight, however, is explicitly personal: “I lost my father during the Covid period. Only my mother was allowed to attend the funeral, so I followed everything online via a Facebook video. It was a pixelated experience that kept imposing itself over the years. I noticed that I still had painful feelings about it and that I wanted to do something with them. Starlight became a form of therapeutic processing.”
The form that imposed itself was that of the top of the cremation pavilion, an architectural element shaped like a crown. She discovered that this refers to Mount Meru, a mythical cosmic mountain in Hinduism and Buddhism that has been described for thousands of years in Purāṇic stories. At the same time, she learned that Cambodian dancers wear a similar crown, called a makhut. “A Belgian-Cambodian friend told me that this crown is made of gold so that dancers can be in communication with the heavens. Gold conducts energy well and functions as a kind of antenna.”
It is as if the development of her visual practice over recent years comes together in her latest work Starlight. In Dharma Songs, Samboleap Tol adopts a caring stance together with friends and family by turning towards the past and addressing questions to ancestors, even when answers remain absent. In Cosmic Tortoise, she connects this care to a longer timeline, through the mythological story of Vishnu, which points to continuity through time. With Starlight, Samboleap Tol explicitly turns towards the future. She asks those closest to her what advice they wish to pass on to future generations. Their words form part of the sculpture and can be discovered in the Prospects section during Art Rotterdam.
Written by Emily van Driessen
Developments in AI and biotechnology are progressing at lightning speed. How do they affect our understanding of life, individuality and identity? These are major questions and precisely what leading Japanese artist Meiro Koizumi is famous for addressing.
In his work, he explores such themes as nationalism, power relations and the role played by collective memory in shaping our behaviour. He links these subjects to questions about the position of the human body in a world that is increasingly unfolding online, where technology plays an ever more dominant role.
As mentioned above, these are substantial themes, making it all the more impressive that Koizumi’s work remains accessible and easy to grasp, from drawings and photographs to video installations and sculptures. This is partly due to his working method. While talking about Altars, his new series of sculptures, he explains that they are the result of a series of intuitive actions. “The sum of all these intuitive actions creates a work that transcends words and concepts and speaks directly to our instincts.”
You can find out for yourself, as the recent sculpture BOR (2024) is currently displayed at Sculpture Park. Meiro Koizumi is represented by Galerie Annet Gelink.
Meiro Koizumi (Japan, 1974) lives and works in Yokohama, Japan. But it’s no coincidence that his work is being shown in the Netherlands. His relationship with the country now spans more than 20 years. After studying in Tokyo and London, he was a resident at the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam between 2005 and 2006. In his broad practice, Koizumi looks both to the future and the past, with such recurring elements as power relations, technology and collective memory.
Good Machine Bad Machine
After returning to Japan following his time at the Rijksakademie, he was able to view his homeland with fresh eyes. He noticed how the national mood had shifted. “Our economy was stagnating and the population began to shrink, while China was growing, South Korea was performing well and North Korea is located right next to us. Our self-confidence seemed to have taken a blow.”
He keenly observed how issues that had once been highly sensitive, such as displays of the national flag, celebrating the emperor’s birthday and calls for a national army, suddenly found fertile ground. This sentiment accelerated after the Fukushima disaster in 2011. Symbols can survive natural disasters, as they offer something to hold onto when everything around you is collapsing, both literally and figuratively.
For 11 years, Meiro Koizumi filmed nationalist demonstrations. This resulted in the video installation Good Machine Bad Machine (2023). At the front, we see hypnotised actors uttering words and short phrases while moving through the full emotional spectrum, from fear and anger to happiness and enthusiasm. Behind them, we see footage of the demonstrations. By presenting these films simultaneously, Koizumi questions the extent to which we are truly in control of our own emotions. Do we consciously choose to become outraged about certain issues or are we fuelled by technology and unconsciously influenced by propaganda?
Soluble Meat
In the recent film, Soluble Meat (2025), the tension between technological progress and the loss of free will resurfaces. Again, he links the theme to our subconscious. Koizumi created Soluble Meat using the AI programme Luma Dream Machine. He fed the AI archival footage of hypnosis sessions and entered the prompt: “This is a tragic film about people who are losing their free will.”
He then repeatedly reinserted the image generated by the algorithm back into the programme, each time with the same prompt. By repeating this process every five seconds, a film emerged in which incomprehensible events slowly unfold. The scenes are recognisable yet dreamlike, creating an uncanny atmosphere. The video was subsequently entered into Google Gemini to generate the voice-over.
Although Koizumi considers the film an AI stream of consciousness, he emphasises that there is always a human behind the controls. Soluble Meat not only echoes the automatic writing of the Surrealists; it also demonstrates that our subconscious is influenced not only by memory and imagination, but now also by algorithms.
In limbo
With the series Altars, Koizumi shifts the question of technological influence from the mental to the physical domain. At Sculpture Park, BOR (2024) is on display, a sculpture featuring a lower torso on one side and on the other, a single leg and detached hand. Between them is a column drill. It appears as if the human body has been fed through a shredder and emerged in smaller fragments.
That is precisely the point Koizumi wishes to make. As our social lives increasingly unfold in the digital realm, our awareness of the physical body starts to fade. Last year at Museum De Pont, the Altars hung helplessly from chains, suspended between the real and the virtual in a limbo state that was neither human nor machine.
“What I find dangerous about this development is the tendency to treat living beings as objects. There is a potential for violence here,” says Koizumi. “The challenge is how we can rescue warm-bodied humans from this limbo. I consider that my life’s work.”
“The idea of connecting humans with machines has existed for 200 years – Frankenstein, for example, is now two centuries old. Yet a sculpture of a lower body topped with an engine block still creates a glitch in our brains. Our survival instincts are triggered by a sense of danger.”
Since his time at the Rijksakademie, Meiro Koizumi has been represented by Galerie Annet Gelink, where he has held seven solo exhibitions. His work is included in the collections of the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo, Museum of Modern Art, Tate, Kadist Art Foundation, Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam and Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen. Last year, he presented a retrospective exhibition at Museum De Pont in Tilburg in the Netherlands.
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.
Fiona Lutjenhuis’s youth was shaped by an exceptional context: she grew up in the Malva sect, a religious community in a village in Brabant, which she left behind at the age of sixteen. This closed sect drew on an eclectic mix of theosophy, esoteric cosmology, secret societies and beliefs surrounding supernatural and extraterrestrial life. Lutjenhuis translates this ideological legacy and her personal memories into a hybrid visual language, enriched by archival research. Her work is not a literal reconstruction, but rather a symbolic and poetic retelling, often infused with humour, as a way of getting some grip on her past. The resulting works frequently combine playful and grim elements. For Lutjenhuis, her practice is a way of reinterpreting her exceptional childhood without attaching judgement to it. She approaches the world from a rational, autonomous and agnostic worldview, while at the same time retaining a spiritual curiosity about could might possibly exist.
At Kunsthal Rotterdam, Lutjenhuis presents, for example, two large folding screens titled “I Flourish Into Chaos” (2024). On the panels, the leaders of the sect appear as birds of prey: owls and a hawk. Floating buildings with seemingly transparent walls depict scenes from her family history, in which people are rendered as static Japanese kokeshi dolls. This visual language is not a coincidence: the Malva sect regularly appropriated elements from different religious and cultural traditions. The all-seeing eye that recurs on the screens refers to Geza-4, the planet that is regarded within the sect as the ultimate place of refuge.
The artist often creates works that evoke a sense of domestic shelter, including a birdhouse and a painted light-blue bed construction with the telling title “Family Trip”. In that work, the bed frame is transformed into a sandbox with small sandcastles, causing the piece of furniture to lose its domestic function and literally turn into a charged landscape. Lutjenhuis’s oeuvre is populated by human, animal and extraterrestrial figures and engages with themes such as belief, power and submission.
Fiona Lutjenhuis was born in Zevenaar in 1991. She studied at the ArtEZ University of the Arts in Arnhem and subsequently took part in the residency programme at the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten in Amsterdam. Her work was previously shown at Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, Het Noordbrabants Museum, 1646, the Dordrechts Museum, Schiphol Airport, the H3H Biennale and Drawing Centre Diepenheim. It is held in the collections of, among others, the AkzoNobel Art Foundation, Museum Helmond and SCHUNCK Glaspaleis.
Fiona, could you tell us more about the work you are presenting at Art Rotterdam and at Kunsthal Rotterdam?
The work I am showing at Art Rotterdam is an installation with a combination piece of furniture as a bed, with a mosquito net, paintings, sculptures and soft toys. For this presentation, I deliberately chose a setting in which I feel safest and where I can retreat for a moment, even at an art fair. The imagery in the paintings is based on dreams that have stayed with me: a world between sleeping and waking, a place where I like to be and where rules can be distorted. Once I wake up, I am often disappointed that everything is once again governed by social, political and natural rules. Despite the fact that I have many nightmares, I also love sleeping, because the world then feels more fluid, as a form of escape. Three paintings are presented in which dreams are depicted.
For Kunsthal Rotterdam, I have two folding screens in mind, which together form the work “I Flourish Into Chaos” (2024). I made these two screens based on the ten entities from other planets that were central to my parents’ religious beliefs. The entity that was discussed most was Master Ankhmania. The masters, also known as the guardians, are depicted on the reverse side as conical forms.
Within the screens unfolds a pine forest populated by birds, including birds of prey and an owl. Notably, the owl is not counted among the birds of prey. The birds stand for the entities believed to inhabit birds. They hold us like dolls. The dolls in the floating houses represent metaphorical scenarios from our household. For me, the combination of birds and dolls conveys the feeling that I was protected, but at the same time also controlled. Out of fear of the unknown, I hoped that the entities from other planets would look like birds.
The eastern influences that often recur in my work have a clear origin. As a child, I was convinced that my previous life had taken place somewhere in Asia. My father affirmed that idea: he believed he had lived in Scotland in a previous life and my mother in France or Spain, where she was labelled a witch. Absurd, of course, but within my childhood imagination and the context in which I grew up, this felt entirely normal.
In addition, I have a strong preference for Japanese, South Korean, Thai and Chinese design. What appeals to me, for example, is that in South Korea, art and design are not separated. I believe that’s a realistic way of looking at culture: as a whole in which belief, art and daily life are interconnected. For the folding screens, I also looked at their origins. They travelled from China to Europe and gradually became westernised there. Both works contain quite intimate references to my own worlds and those of my parents and the religious sect. By presenting these references in a playful, childlike way, I hope to soothe myself and make the whole more bearable.
What are your plans for 2026?
This year, I started compiling drawings, together with publisher Terry Bleu. That book will be published in March. In addition, I am working on two presentations abroad, although unfortunately I cannot share anything about those just yet.
I am also busy ticking off everything I still want to do. It think it’s important to realise the work I truly want to make, without later regretting that I never did it. To that end, I collaborate a lot with other artists and makers, combining our crafts and challenging one another. In this way, boundaries continue to be pushed.
From these collaborations, a new, free presentation will also emerge. In that context, experimentation is a plus. For me as an artist, it is the driving force that keeps the engine running.
Can you describe how you felt when you heard that you had been nominated for the NN Art Award?
I felt honoured, but also somewhat conflicted, as I’ve also been nominated for another prize recently [the Prix de Rome, ed.]. At the same time, I am very grateful that I am able to take up space as an artist and represent my imagination and the horror within it. It makes me happy that I am being welcomed into the art world with this work.
What project would you take on immediately if you were to win the award?
I would love to curate an exhibition myself with other makers and artists, working from project-based collectives. What I truly dream of are large installations in which others can physically enter our worlds. For me, one work is basically half a work. I enjoy creating series with multiple layers and contexts, in which all kinds of stories emerge. I would therefore like to realise a show in which a great deal of work comes together, with room for others to also take their place within it. I would want to curate that exhibition myself.
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
During the upcoming edition of Art Rotterdam, the NN Art Award will be presented for the tenth time. This prestigious incentive prize is awarded to an artist showing work at the fair who has completed their education at a Dutch institution.
The award is not only a mark of recognition, but also offers artists support in further developing their practice. As part of the nomination, the work of all nominees will be on view at Kunsthal Rotterdam from 14 March to 25 May.
This year’s professional jury, representing a broad perspective on the contemporary art field, consisted of:
They nominated the following four artists:
Tina Farifteh (Tehran, 1982) is a photographer and filmmaker. In her work, she investigates how power structures affect the lives of ordinary people. She entices the viewer to look at subjects we would rather turn away from because they are complex or uncomfortable. For Document Nederland 2025, her project on the Dutch asylum system, Farifteh follows B., who, after more than four months in immigration detention at Schiphol and a stay in Ter Apel, enters the asylum procedure. By positioning B. as the narrator, Farifteh shifts our perspective on asylum processes. Rather than speaking about asylum seekers, she allows us to listen to them directly. In doing so, Farifteh holds up a mirror to the viewer: the work is not about them, but about us. Tina Farifteh is represented by Gallery Vriend van Bavink.
The work of Mandy Franca (Rotterdam, 1989) is an ongoing investigation into connectedness, drawing on her childhood in a cross-cultural environment and her personal memories. Franca examines and observes the significance of the everyday, granting lasting value to what may seem insignificant. As an artist, she subverts and questions the traditional use of printmaking by experimenting with a wide range of artistic media that come together in painting, iPhone photography, printmaking, drawing, collage, video, sound, sculpture and installation. Recurring elements are the photographic image and mark-making. Mandy Franca is represented by Night Café Gallery.
The practice of Fiona Lutjenhuis (Zevenaar, 1991) centres on depicting and reinterpreting the religious ideologies she grew up with in a village in North Brabant. Her parents were members of a sect based on a mix of theosophical ideas, esoteric cosmologies and beliefs in extraterrestrial life and supernatural beings. Lutjenhuis’ folding screens, drawings and murals function as carriers of stories. In a poetic way, she combines esoteric new age aesthetics with a range of visual influences drawn from comics, Japanese prints and medieval religious paintings. Fiona Lutjenhuis is represented by Galerie Fleur & Wouter.
Kyra Nijskens (Ulestraten, 1997) explores how humans influence and reshape ecological systems. Her work focuses on biofouling: the attachment of marine and micro-organisms to industrial structures such as ship hulls and underwater pipelines. Unnoticed, these organisms travel along shipping routes, settle and disrupt existing infrastructures. Her work also comments on logistical systems. Each year, 1,382 shipping containers are lost at sea, sometimes resulting in cargoes of Crocs or yellow rubber ducks polluting beaches.
The winner of the NN Art Award will be announced on Friday 27 March 2026 during a festive gathering at Kunsthal Rotterdam.
Written by Flor Linckens
‘We are radical and we are playful. We pull you out of your comfort zone. We work together with you. We let you form a new relationship with your environment.’ Signed: Studio C.A.R.E. There is not a single word of exaggeration in those statements. C.A.R.E. stands for Catastrophe, Analysis, Relation, Environment. That may sound like abstract management jargon, but the working method of the Rotterdam-based Studio C.A.R.E. is in fact very physical and tangible.
‘We sell catastrophes,’ Christine van Meegen says over the phone. Not that Studio C.A.R.E. inflicts a catastrophe on you, as these catastrophes have already taken place. Instead, Studio C.A.R.E. offers you a way out of a difficult situation. For example, this may involve your immediate surroundings, such as your home. The German couple behind Studio C.A.R.E., Van Meegen and her partner Sebastian Kubersky, do not approach this half-heartedly. Just ask Patrick, the man who gave them permission to remodel his house. Everything was tackled: walls were taken down with a sledgehammer and furniture was sawn apart.
Patrick had not been feeling quite himself for some time and his cluttered living space certainly did not help. Time for a change. NDR, Norddeutscher Rundfund, filmed the Abrissparty – a term that captures the spirit of the event better than the prosaic word ‘renovation’.
The concept is best described as a combination of Help, My Husband is a DIY Disaster – including the setbacks during construction and mental walls people run into – with an extended consultation with a decisive psychologist. But C.A.R.E. uses a sledgehammer instead of the insights of Carl Jung. If all goes well, the renovation has a cathartic effect and by the end, your relationship with your environment will be restored.
It may sound drastic, but nothing could be further from the truth. Studio C.A.R.E. works according to a plan. Everything was discussed with Patrick beforehand: what would happen and what role he and the neighbours would play in the process. That said, there is room for improvisation. Moreover, Patrick was in safe hands. Christine van Meegen has a background in interior design and has studied, among other places, at the Design Academy Eindhoven. Afterward graduation, Van Meegen and Kubersky decided to stay in the Netherlands, with Rotterdam as their base.
The couple’s practice extends beyond the ‘curated catastrophes’, of which Patrick’s apartment is an example. A common denominator is that they work with local residents. This winter, together with residents of the working-class neighbourhood Bospolder-Tussendijken, they developed heating panels. Nine groups developed and tested an infrared panel. These panels heat the body instead of the room, and do so in a highly energy-efficient way. The underlying idea is to prevent people on tight budgets from being left in the cold.
Another example is the playful modular (wall) system ROSy – short for Rotterdam interior – made of perforated board. ROSy allows users to organise a space according to their own preferences and insights. Once again, the duo aims to reconnect people with their environment by giving them control over it.
At Art Rotterdam, you’ll find a sculpture by Studio C.A.R.E. in the Sculpture Park. When we talked to Van Meegen in mid-January, she did not yet know how the sculpture will look. “We often respond to the space that is available to us. We need to gauge how much space we get and what kind of space it is. Ideally, it becomes a sculpture you can physically enter, with a surprise inside.”
Studio C.A.R.E. is represented by Galerie Melike Bilir from Hamburg. The Galerie Melike Bilir stand can be found in the New Art Section.
Written by Wouter van den Eijkel
During Art Rotterdam, taking place at Rotterdam Ahoy from March 27 to 29, the Mondriaan Fund will present the new edition of Prospects. The exhibition, now in its 14th year at Art Rotterdam, showcases the work of 92 emerging artists. All artists received a financial contribution in 2024 within the Artist Start grant of the Mondriaan Fund to kickstart their career.
The 14th edition of Prospects is being curated by Johan Gustavsson and Daphne Verberg.
Gustavsson is co-director of 1646 and a lecturer at the KABK. Verberg is a freelance curator and project manager. She is currently working on a series of solo presentations at the Palace of Justice in The Hague and for the past two years, she has been co-director of the resort.
Gustavsson and Verberg on the exhibition:
“Prospects 2026 highlights a new wave of artists who address today’s changing world with imagination, rigour, and great energy. This 14th edition of Prospects, participants take on urgent questions from reshaping collective memory to examining new relationships between technology, ecology and the human body. Their works show that experimentation and care can go hand in hand, offering glimpses of alternative futures that are both challenging and full of possibilities. We are honoured to introduce this diverse group of talents, whose practices reflect the richness and momentum of contemporary art in the Netherlands.”
The Mondriaan Fund organises the ‘Prospects’ exhibition each year to give the visibility of starting artists an extra boost. The proximity of Art Rotterdam gives art professionals and collectors, but also a broad group of interested parties, the opportunity to become acquainted with the work of these promising artists.
“My delusional thinking brings sinister light, uncanny shadows, and a dystopian background, evoking the melancholy of my memory onto the canvas.” – Shimon Kamada
Through the fascinating psyche of artist Shimon Kamada (1997, Japan), we enter a treacherous terrain between abstraction and figuration. Here, a silver lining emerges: the relief that these two are not split ends of a spectrum at all. When reality begins to resemble a dream, and dreams become ever more rooted in reality, the duality itself starts to feel redundant. It is precisely within this intriguing in-between space that Kamada’s paintings take shape.
In the new art section of Art Rotterdam 2026, Diez Gallery presents a solo exhibition with recent works by Shimon Kamada which depict scenes from the artist’s early childhood until the present day. “My work is rooted in personal history and recalls nostalgic scenes from my mind. Having been away from my hometown in Japan for many years, I have had more time to reflect on it, and my recent works are influenced by customs, events, upbringing, and family dynamics. I hope they will evoke sensations of past memories running through the visitors’ minds, just like seeing a flashback.”
Using memory as his driving force brings with it an elusive, and therefore deceptive, creative energy. However at the same time, it can be strangely soothing and reassuring when our minds start to play tricks on us, as our recollection begins to lose clarity. Fusing seemingly divergent elements of reality, figuration, abstraction and fiction together is one of Kamada’s ways of coping with latent trauma. “There are many moments I want to return to; they are so beautiful that it feels almost pitiful to forget them, yet they are also painful memories I wish I could do over,” Kamada says.
In his latest series of works, Kamada also touches upon the overlapping and intersectional nature of lived experiences and the memories attached to them. He refers to an intimate family situation that became a profound experience for his work: a few years ago, his grandfather asked him to paint his funeral portrait, shortly before being diagnosed with a terminal illness. As different family members responded to his illness from their own positions, Kamada became increasingly aware of the conflicting emotions surrounding that moment. “By depicting our memories and the unique position of each family member, I explore these conflicting emotions to find ways to empathize with one another. It allows every family member to become an important character in my paintings.”
By projecting these different positions and sensations into dreamlike scenes, viewers with different memories may draw different worlds from Kamada’s paintings. An agency of one’s subjectivity is felt throughout the openness that Kamada provides. “My house, for example, is a typical Japanese home, but certain elements escape recognition by Western audiences and evoke unexpected interpretations. I hope viewers imagine the events depicted in my paintings as if they were happening in their own lives, and that a deja vu-like experience will provide opportunities for us to share stories in front of my paintings.”
Also the physical materiality of the paintings overlaps with Kamada’s emotional concept. The artist has already been experimenting with the approach of repainting on used canvases, but more recently he sands the surface as well to reveal fragments of hidden paintings on the underlayer. “I apply acrylic and oil on secondhand paintings and then damage the surface with sandpaper. The layered paint displays the multifaceted reality in everyday life moments. In each painting I depict family members that I extract from photo albums. I think sanding feels like an additional process to reinforce the context of recorrection. The damaged texture and faded colours even evoke the old photo albums, and the layering of new paintings on old paintings represents the process of memory: new pieces of information accumulate and overlay the old ones.”
It is as if sanding is Kamada’s way of treating the surface like a wooden dining table that holds dear memories of family meals, coffee stains, love and conflict, gently sanded down over the years, only so it can be lived with again, allowing new memories to settle over the old ones.
And so it becomes clear that beyond what the eye can perceive Kamada’s paintings capture what lies dormant in the subconscious: the vapourness of time, the lingering scents of fading stories, and the nostalgia that comes with reliving memories, whether real, imagined, or somewhere in between.
Bio
Shimon Kamada (1997, Japan, lives and works in The Netherlands) won the Ron Mandos Residency Award (2020) and worked at Brutus Lab in Rotterdam (2021) as an artist-in-residence. He has participated in group exhibitions including Podium Gallery, Hong Kong (2025), Van Nelle Fabriek, Rotterdam (2024), Enari Gallery, Amsterdam (2023), ARWE Gallery, Gouda (2022), Wilford X, Temse (2022), Felix Solo Gallery, Nijmegen (2021), Atelier of AVL Mundo, Rotterdam (2021), Het HEM, Zaandam (2020), among others.
On show at New Art section, Shimon Kamada, diez gallery
Written by Emily van Driessen
