Coming soon
Coming soon
Select type
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.
During Art Rotterdam 2026, the NN Art Award will be presented for the tenth time, marking a special jubilee edition. The award is presented annually to talented artists who have completed a programme at a Dutch art institute and are showing work at Art Rotterdam. For ten years, the award has offered artists an important springboard. Prize winners have gone on to find their way into museums and collections both in the Netherlands and abroad. The NN Art Award represents a consistent and content-driven investment in the visibility and development of artistic talent. The winner will be announced during a festive evening at Kunsthal Rotterdam on Friday 27 March. Work by the four nominees will be on view there from 14 March until 25 May 2026 in a dedicated exhibition.
A sustainable partnership
Nationale-Nederlanden, part of NN Group, has been a partner of Art Rotterdam since 2017. In this capacity, they award an annual incentive prize to outstanding contemporary artistic talent. The focus is on artists with a distinct and innovative visual language. Their work often engages with social themes or stands out through a striking technical approach. The award is intended both for emerging talent and for artists who have already taken further steps in their careers. Thanks to multidisciplinary selection criteria, all media are eligible.
Room for development and visibility
The winner receives a cash prize of €10,000, intended to further develop their practice and reach a wider audience. The nominees are once again given the opportunity to present their work at Kunsthal Rotterdam. The exhibition runs from 14 March until 25 May and attracted more than 24.000 visitors last year. In addition, all four nominees are featured in an article on GalleryViewer.com. Nationale-Nederlanden also acquires work by one or more of the nominees for the NN Art Collection.
The quality of Dutch art education
The NN Art Award draws attention to the high level of art education in the Netherlands. Artists from all over the world consciously seek out leading institutes such as the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten, De Ateliers, the Jan van Eyck Academie and the Piet Zwart Institute.
Looking back at 2025
At the previous edition, Pris Roos received the award. She is represented by Mini Galerie. Roos: “Winning the NN Art Award gave me the opportunity and the means to sharpen my goals and set up a second studio in Bogor, Indonesia, where my family originally comes from. Spending time in a city with a rich natural environment, frequent rainfall, a deeply rooted colonial history and diverse communities prompted deeper reflection. I want to approach my practice from different sensory and historical perspectives. I am already learning a great deal there from local residents, for example about the innovative ways in which they use plastic and paper in their daily routines, such as making a fan from plastic bottles. In Indonesia, I engage in conversations, observe and strengthen connections with local partners, both residents and institutions. Reflections from this period are already visible in my upcoming exhibitions at CODA Apeldoorn and Museum Limburg, in collaboration with Riboet Verhalenkunst. In addition, my first children’s book, ‘Toko van mijn ouders’, will be published this year. Thank you Nationale-Nederlanden, Art Rotterdam, Kunsthal and the jury members. It truly means so much for an artist to be able to tell your story.”
The jury
The selection is entrusted to a jury of art professionals that changes annually. The jury nominates four artists and subsequently selects the winner of the NN Art Award. The jury is interdisciplinary and brings together perspectives from different fields, including art journalists, curators, museum directors, artists, art collectors and the curator of the NN Art Collection. This year, the jury consists of:
Galleries participating in Art Rotterdam can nominate artists for the NN Art Award. In addition, the curator of the Prospects section of the Mondriaan Fund will once again put forward 5 artists this year, presenting a selection of the most promising talents in the exhibition.
The four nominees for the NN Art Award 2026 will be announced in early February.
Festive award ceremony at Kunsthal Rotterdam
The winner of the NN Art Award 2026 will be announced during a festive evening at Kunsthal Rotterdam on Friday 27 March. Following the ceremony, all exhibitions at the Kunsthal, including the NN Art Award presentation, will be freely accessible to attending guests.
About Nationale-Nederlanden
Nationale-Nederlanden (part of NN Group) is an international financial services provider with a long-standing tradition of supporting art and culture. NN is the main partner of Kunsthal Rotterdam and a partner of Art Rotterdam.
Written by Flor Linckens
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
“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
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
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
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
