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In the DHB Art Space, made possible by new main partner DHB Bank, Rotterdam-based collective Unity in Diversity Rotterdam (UID) presents an interactive sound artwork by media artist Pedro Gil Farias (developed in collaboration with sound artist Marcin Sky). This artwork, Echoes of Us, focuses on a dreamed future for the residents of Zuid and the area development around Zuidplein and Rotterdam Ahoy. Following an ‘open call’, UID selected Rotterdam-based media artist Pedro Gil Farias from dozens of submissions. Echoes of Us gives a voice to the dreams of artists and residents in the neighbourhood, and invites visitors to Art Rotterdam to share their own dreams too. As an interactive tool, the artwork builds a collective dream for a liveable and sustainable future of Rotterdam South.
Atelier Van Lieshout (AVL) is known for monumental sculptures that merge art, architecture, and social research, balancing a playful yet confrontational tone. The work explores power, autonomy, and the role of the artist in a society where visibility and recognition are never guaranteed. Since 1995, Joep van Lieshout has worked under the name Atelier Van Lieshout, a deliberate choice to challenge the classical myth of the individual artist. At Art Rotterdam 2025, in collaboration with Galerie Ron Mandos, AVL presents the Tomb of the Unknown Artist (2024) in Sculpture Park, an homage to the many artists who have remained in the shadows of art history.
Tomb of the Unknown Artist: A Tragedy of Unrecognised Love
A concrete tomb rests on a gun carriage, the undercarriage of a cannon traditionally used to transport the coffins of generals, emperors, and heads of state to their final resting place. Once a symbol of state power and heroism, the gun carriage took on a ceremonial role in state funerals, marking national mourning on a grand scale. In many traditions, it is not a final resting place but merely a temporary means of transport to a grave or mausoleum. Here, it no longer carries a statesman but a monument to the forgotten artist. It is a symbolic transition between life and death, between oblivion and recognition.
Atop the tomb lies a bronze lion, still, perhaps asleep, perhaps lifeless. “That lion is a symbol of strength and perseverance,” says Joep van Lieshout. “The king of the animal kingdom sleeps, or dies, but could also wake up and move on.”
The work is both a monument and a commentary on the unpredictability of recognition. “Artists often lead incredibly tough lives,” says Van Lieshout. “I know so many people who dedicate their entire lives to creating beautiful things, only to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.” Some are later rediscovered; others disappear entirely. He calls it “a tragedy of unrecognised love.” The work carries a humorous undertone while being deeply serious at the same time. “Humour makes serious messages easier to digest,” he adds with a smile.
On the side of the sculpture, there is an opening, an alcove reminiscent of an ossuary, a place where human remains are stored. “We looked at ossuaries as a source of inspiration for this monument,” says Van Lieshout. “It is a sculpture that remains open to what is yet to come.” In the future, the bones and ashes of unknown artists could be placed here. It is not a closed monument but a space that can literally be filled with the physical remains of those who never received recognition.
Protected, Forgotten, Almighty?
Alongside the Tomb of the Unknown Artist, Atelier Van Lieshout presents three other sculptures at Art Rotterdam, each exploring, in its own way, the tension between protection, power, and erasure.
Tree of Life (2016) is a tree standing over three metres tall, bearing human-shaped fruit in various stages of ripeness. “It can be a representation of life and fertility, but just as much of violence and disappearance,” says Van Lieshout.
Maria’s Cloak (2023) questions who receives protection and who is left outside. Maria’s cloak does not offer automatic safety.
Omnipotent (2023) plays with authority and submission. “Omnipotent is another word for the Almighty,” says Van Lieshout. The sculpture depicts a hand whose meaning shifts depending on its positioning. “You can place it upright, and it becomes a stop sign. Turn it with the palm facing up, and suddenly, it becomes the begging hand of an artist.”
A Floral Tribute at the Monument
On 27 March 2025 at 19:00, a symbolic flower-laying ceremony will take place at the Tomb of the Unknown Artist (2024). Visitors are invited to bring flowers and lay them at the monument, a final tribute to the artists who remained invisible during their lifetimes. Joep van Lieshout will give a short speech about the work and its broader context within Art Rotterdam.
Is it a comic or tragic gesture? It seems to carry the same ambiguity as the lion resting atop the tomb.
Written by Emily Van Driessen
At Art Rotterdam (28-30 March at Rotterdam Ahoy), No Man’s Art Gallery presents a dual presentation featuring the work of Benjamin Francis and Tobias Thaens. For Francis, this marks the beginning of his collaboration with the gallery, which will continue with his solo exhibition ‘A foot between the door’, on view at the gallery in Amsterdam from 22 March until 20 April 2025.
In his multidisciplinary practice, Francis explores the hidden mechanisms of power, control and correction that shape our perception of right and wrong. Through installations, videos, sculptures, texts and performances, he exposes the underlying structures that define the individual. His work invites viewers to pause and consider: who makes the rules, and what happens when we rewrite them? Why do we seek control over our surroundings — both bodies and inanimate objects — and how does that lead to a rigid normativity and conformity?
Drawing inspiration from dance and the tension between obedience and resistance, Francis examines how subtle forms of correction — through language, body language or architecture — shape social structures and the human experience. In a society driven by efficiency, where deviation from the norm is deemed undesirable and imperfections are meticulously erased, his work creates space for doubt, discomfort and the imperfect. He investigates how errors and deviations are corrected or excluded within social, pedagogical and knowledge systems. This theme resonates with him personally: as someone with dyslexia, he experienced firsthand how spelling mistakes were treated as undesirable, subjecting him to constant correction. His work raises the question: who determines what is ‘right’, and what dogmas and power dynamics lie beneath? Does such a strict binary opposition between right and wrong even exist? Francis sees his art as a means not to conceal flaws and decay but to examine them, both in language and in material.
Language plays a central role in his research, and his work moves between object-based pieces and participatory performances, often placing the audience in unexpected situations and inviting them to become part of the installation. In a previous performance at Hotel Maria Kapel, where he completed a residency program, Francis used texts that had been repeatedly processed through translation software, revealing errors and misinterpretations. Participants were asked to read these texts aloud and relate to them, undermining the supposed objectivity and neutrality of language and exposing its entanglement with power and hierarchy. In these performances, the viewer is not merely an observer but an active participant in a constantly shifting system. In “A Claim for Your Own Good”, performed at the Luther Museum, Francis staged a fictional cleaning company that subtly exposed power dynamics through ritualised actions.
The relationship between body and memory also plays a crucial role. Our bodies make mistakes that shape our awareness. We feel things or are moved by them without always realising it. Memories are stored in our bodies, often without our conscious awareness.
A recurring motif in his work is the interplay between dirt and cleanliness. Excessive purification is bound to leaves traces. What remains is a reality that has been repeatedly polished, adjusted, corrected and purified. What does that do to a body that must constantly submit to this process, effectively becoming an archive of discipline? And how can we erase the traces of years of imposed correction, ingrained deep into our skin and minds? And what happens when cleaning is no longer just a physical act but a means of control? When purification is disguised as care — a care imposed upon you because, for whatever reason, you hold less power within the dominant system? Francis confronts the viewer with this paradoxical dynamic, where systems of power, correction and normativity are embedded in our most everyday actions.
The installations of the artist transform environments into performative spaces, making visitors acutely aware of their position within systems of discipline and normativity. A bathroom, a classroom, a mortuary, a ballet studio: functional spaces that he subtly disrupts, making them no longer ‘fit’. Their original function shifts, becomes unsettled, and gives way to tension and new meanings. In previous installations, such as “The Removal of the Eye” at P/////AKT, visitors were challenged to walk across fragile white tiles, each step leaving a mark: a direct confrontation with the tension between purity and decay, control and surrender. These fields of tension are central to his practice.
Francis continually returns to the notion of ‘the other’, those who deviate from the norm. It is a position that he identifies with personally as a queer person of colour with dyslexia. Those who do not fit into societal frameworks, for instance due to their social or economic position, are subject to greater control. By positioning ‘the other’ as the norm (the opposite of ‘othering’) he makes the norm itself visible, open to analysis and critique. He shifts the perspective: it is not ‘them’ who are questioned, but the norm itself. This process allows him to examine and challenge how these systems function and who enforces them. Authority and normativity are not fixed concepts but are constantly rewritten by the structures that uphold them.
At Art Rotterdam and in his solo exhibition at No Man’s Art Gallery, Francis explores the relationship between space and the body.
Benjamin Francis (1996) graduated from the Fine Arts department at ArtEZ BEAR in Arnhem in 2020, with a focus on Experiment, Art, and Research. His work has previously been shown at No Man’s Art Gallery, NL; Christine König Galerie, AU; Art Antwerp, BE; Luther Museum, NL; PuntWG, NL; Ballroom Project #6, BE; Hotel Maria Kapel, NL; If I Can’t Dance, Kunsthuis Syb, Het HEM, P/////AKT, NL; MÉLANGE, DE; Rencontres internationales, DE; SECONDroom, BE; and Mutter, NL.
At Art Rotterdam, Benjamin Francis will present his work in the booth of No Man’s Art Gallery. His solo exhibition will be on view at the gallery in Amsterdam from 22 March until 20 April 2025.
Written by Flor Linckens
On the way to his apartment one night, Jonas Brinker was walking through Times Square and much to his surprise, saw a dragonfly resting on the sidewalk in one of the busiest places in the world. Brinker had his camera with him and decided to kneel down and film the insect head-on. The dragonfly appears to be looking at us throughout the entire film because it is the only thing we see. But at the same time, we are able to take in much of the surroundings: the constantly changing lights of the LED billboards, sirens, cars and conversations.
“The work is centred on presence rather than meaning,” says Brinker. “The dragonfly is not there to represent anything, but to simply exist as an individual in that moment.” Untitled (25.07.2022, 02:14 AM) fits seamlessly with Brinker’s work, in which elements that have existed for a long time – the dragonfly has been around for around 320 million years – come together in a fleeting manner.
Jonas Brinker (Germany, 1989) is regarded as one of the most prominent video artists of his generation. His work has been exhibited at Marres in Maastricht (2018), Palais de Tokyo in Paris (2018), the Berlin nightclub Berghain (2020), and last year at Piccadilly Circus in London. We spoke with Jonas Brinker shortly before the opening of his first institutional solo exhibition at the Kunstverein Harburger Bahnhof in Hamburg.
Jonas Brinker is presented by Zyrland Zoiropa, Berlin and his Untitled (25.07.2022, 02:14 AM) is on display in the Projections Section.
You mentioned earlier you were working on a major show at Kunstverein Harburger Bahnhof in Hamburg last week. Are you pleased with how it turned out?
Yes, I was preparing my first institutional solo show at Kunstverein Harburger Bahnhof in Hamburg. The exhibition revolves around fireflies in Central Park, translated into an expansive video installation within the historic waiting room of the Kunstverein. Their bioluminescent signals, emitted during their final phase of life for species-specific communication, are set against aerial shots of the New York skyline at night, transforming an attempt to capture their flashes into a melancholic exploration of longing, time and the interwoven worlds of human and non-human beings.
I’m really pleased with how the show turned out and just love the fact that the space is located between the tracks of a railway station, making it an especially compelling setting for time-based works.
The way your time-based works are presented is a key aspect of your work. What presentation did you have in mind/would be ideal for Untitled (25.07.2022, 02:14 AM)?
When I filmed the piece, I envisioned it being shown as a floor-standing projection, so the image extends into the actual space. The projection should be taller than a human, so we look at the insect at eye level or even slightly upward, creating an intimate situation where a small, easily overlooked being takes on a strong presence. The encounter gains weight, becoming something resonant.
At Art Rotterdam, Untitled (25.07.2022, 02:14 AM) will be featured in the Projections Section. It revolves around a dragonfly resting in New York’s Times Square. In it we see a close-up of the dragonfly, with its eyes and wings reflecting the changing lights in the surroundings. How did the idea of a dragonfly in Times Square come about?
Well, there’s an interesting connection here – it was not something I had planned or set out to film. I had been working on the other piece and while walking back to the apartment where I was staying downtown, I crossed Times Square in the middle of the night and spotted the dragonfly on the sidewalk. Since I had my camera with me, equipped with a macro lens, I decided to kneel down on the concrete and spend a moment filming the insect. So, in a way, the work is a direct response to an unlikely encounter, something that happened entirely by chance.
The dragonfly is all we see. You might describe it as a recording of the impressions of a dragonfly while resting in Times Square. Was that deliberate?
The deliberate choice here was to film the insect at eye level, with the camera aimed at it head-on. In turn, the dragonfly seems to be looking back at us. This makes it the subject of the encounter, a wild animal recognised as an individual, one I can see very clearly yet whose essence remains elusive. I was intrigued by the reflections of the city lights and billboards in its wings and eyes, in which the surroundings are both absorbed and refracted.
There’s also an element of deep time to it, the ancient insect, largely unchanged for 320 million years, resting on a sidewalk cast from concrete mixed with the glittering remnants of Manhattan’s bedrock, illuminated by the shifting colours of digital screens and advertisements. So, in many ways, I’m interested in what is already there – different elements coming together in a fleeting way.
Of course, we can only speculate on what the insect is observing, but the dragonfly was surely displaced, likely misled by the stark illumination of the square, causing it to get lost. After filming, I brought it to the nearest park.
Throughout history, animals are frequently used metaphorically: lions signify power, wolves represent freedom. The close-up in Untitled (25.07.2022, 02:14 AM) resists metaphorical interpretation. Why do you challenge anthropocentric narratives in your time-based works?
I’m interested in stepping away from the tendency to assign symbolic meaning to non-human animals. The dragonfly is not there to represent anything, but to simply exist as an individual in that moment. The work is centred on presence rather than meaning.
I try to keep that openness in my work, to perceive without imposing, to observe without assuming, to create space for an encounter in which meaning is not fixed but unfolding. By shifting the focus from interpretation to observation, I aim to acknowledge non-human subjectivity without reducing it to a human-assigned role. Even as I try to step away from anthropocentric narratives, I can only ever adopt a human perspective. But by being aware of this limitation, I hope to create a space in which meaning emerges through observation, rather than being imposed.
Written by Wouter van den Eijkel
Artist Tanea Hynes grew up in Labrador City, a remote town in Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada, centred around one thing: iron ore mining. In her work, Hynes reflects on the impact of this industry on the people, nature and identity of the region. Through photography, drawings and installations, she explores how labour, nature and capitalism are intertwined.
Tanea Hynes’ work can be seen at the KIN booth in the New Art section.
A city built on iron
The name might be somewhat misleading, as Labrador City is not a city in the usual sense of the word. It is not a regional trade hub, it lacks a rich cultural life and young people do not move there for education. In Labrador City, everything revolves around mining, the starting point of a global production chain.
The town emerged in the 1960s after the discovery of a large iron ore deposit in the region. It was built according to the utopian ideals of the late 19th-century Garden City movement, intended to create a community where miners and their families could live well. For some time, those expectations were met. In its early years, the Iron Ore Company of Canada invested in modern facilities and social programmes, but after acquisitions by multinationals like Rio Tinto and Mitsubishi, these amenities disappeared.
These social programmes were not a luxury, given that the surrounding area consists of nothing but forest and wilderness. If someone were to go missing in the woods, finding them would be like searching for a needle in a haystack, Hynes notes in her graduation project. The nearest major city, Montreal, is 1,250 km away as the crow flies—roughly the distance from Rotterdam to northern Spain. The population currently fluctuates around 7,500. At its peak in the mid-1970s, the town had 12,000 residents.
These population fluctuations are linked to the global demand for iron ore. Born in 1996, Tanea Hynes has witnessed multiple boom-and-bust cycles over the past decades. Periods of economic prosperity have alternated with deep recessions, during which people lost their jobs, mortgages went unpaid and houses became unsellable. These cycles leave not only an economic imprint, but also shape the social fabric of the town. Labrador City has its own class system of miners and management, each with its own interests, often clashing over labour conditions and wages.
The mine as lifeline and curse
Hynes’ own life is inextricably linked to mining. To finance her studies, she spent five summers working as a truck driver in an open-pit mine. She experienced firsthand the physical and mental toll of the work and relentless pressure to increase production. The mines operate 24/7, 365 days a year, and work only stops in the event of serious accidents.
Reflecting on this experience, Hynes writes:
“This experience helped to shape my perspective on global economics, natural resource extraction, human impact on ecological systems, labor politics, and the world at large. I hold an understanding of the unforgiving demands of the mining industry and the place of myself, my family, and my closest friends within that system. I have experienced many close calls and felt the pressures of the endless push for faster production. Furthermore, I have felt my own body resist in ways that I cannot put into words. These experiences fuel my desire to create urgent works of art and photographs, attempts to materialize what can only be felt in one’s gut.”
This relentless pace impacts not only the workers, but also the landscape. Hynes’ work focuses on both. In theoretical discussions, mining is often—and rightly—equated with environmental destruction. But for those embedded in such a community, like Hynes, mining is more than just devastation. Alongside boredom, addiction and physical pain, there is also hope, solidarity and resilience. She highlights people who care about the natural world and rely on it for physical and mental well-being, relaxation and joy. Her images capture miners spending their free time in nature, seeking peace in the same ecosystem they extract resources from during the week. The relationship between miners, the mine and nature is therefore highly complex.
Testimony and protest
Hynes’ work is often compared to the documentary tradition of Newfoundland and Labrador. In the 1950s–1970s, documentaries played a key role in exposing social inequality and the consequences of large-scale mining. Since then, the mining industry has preferred to stay out of the media, keeping its gates closed to outsiders.
In the fall of 2023, a childhood friend—now in a management position—invited Hynes to photograph a mine. She was surprised at how casually the offer was made. Her upbringing in Labrador City and her connection to the community likely played a role, making her an insider. It may also relate to her less overtly activist approach compared to past documentary filmmakers. Hynes acknowledges the paradox of mining: it is destructive, yet it provides her community’s livelihood.
This paradox is evident in her description of the images she captured in the mine: “While this industry provides vital metals to the ever-expanding world at large, these scenes represent the epicenter of so much chaos, of pain, addiction, sadness, and bleak degradation.” She recognises the importance of mining, yet the cost is undeniably high.
Remediated
In her series Remediated, Hynes juxtaposes images of the mine with pictures of abandoned landscapes where nature is attempting to recover. Sites that were once bustling workplaces are now scars on the land. She poses a crucial question: What remains when the resources are depleted and the mines are abandoned?
Long-term damage from mining is often shifted onto local communities like Labrador City. This series is not on display at Art Rotterdam, but does it gives us an idea why Hynes remains hopeful: “Remediated, along with the portraits in my exhibition, communicate that there is a path forward, and that we are already on that path. The way forward is not only through physical remediation of the land, but in meaningful, mutually beneficial communion with both the land and with each other.”
The road ahead
For Hynes, the way forward lies in an Indigenous, anti-colonial perspective—one that does not consider the earth a collection of extractable commodities, but as an extension of ourselves. In this view, the earth nurtures us and embodies languages, stories and histories.
The broader theme underlying Hynes’ work is humanity’s relationship with the land. Mining occurs worldwide—Labrador City is only one example. The scale surpasses the individual and likely even our imagination. Millions of tons of rock are moved, rivers rerouted and mountains erased. The miners of Labrador City are merely one link in a vast system. They never see the end products of their labour, as the extracted materials are processed elsewhere.
Hynes’ work is both a stark reminder that every industry carries a human and ecological cost and a plea for a new way of thinking about land use. Rather than viewing the earth as an endless source of economic gain, we should see it as an extension of ourselves, a place that deserves care and respect.
Written by Wouter van den Eijkel
Christian Holze’s work (b. 1988, Germany) exists in a space where painting, sculpture, and digital media merge into one another. Represented by Reiter Gallery, he presents Nothing New (2024) at Art Rotterdam’s Sculpture Park, a sculptural intervention that digs into the mechanics of copying, ownership, and authenticity, questioning what it really means to “own” an image or an artwork.
Christian is interested in the spaces between things, between art and commerce, between original and copy, between the seen and the unseen.
Appropriating the Appropriators
Christian systematically collects images from luxury brand campaigns. Gucci draping models in a room full of Roman statues? Louis Vuitton staging a campaign in the Louvre? He saves them, studies them, and then feeds them back into his own work, effectively reversing the cycle. “Companies use art to ennoble their products, making them appear more valuable. I reverse this process by bringing corporate visuals back into an artistic context.”
This extends beyond imagery. His previous exhibition Souvenir from Rome borrows its title from a Gucci campaign, mirroring how brands co-opt cultural heritage. “The advertising becomes a painting again. The product becomes an artwork again. I like that shift.”
The Illusion of Ownership
Holze exposes a contradiction in visual culture: an image watermark signals restriction until you pay to remove it, while a luxury brand logo increases desirability. One marks something as incomplete, the other as exclusive. “When you have the bag, the logo makes it more valuable. But with Getty Images, you just want the watermark gone even though the artwork was never theirs to begin with.”
Christian translates this tension into his own work. His paintings feature a faint, almost imperceptible pattern, his own “watermark.” It’s a subtle but deliberate gesture: a reminder that even in art, ownership is never as simple as it seems.
Provenance as a Living Process
Christian’s fascination with how artworks move through history is embedded in his practice. He studies pieces that have been endlessly copied and reinterpreted, like the Borghese Gladiator, one of the most duplicated sculptures in art history. “I wanted to go as far back as I could while staying within the ‘cliché’ of art history. The Borghese Gladiator became my starting point, it had already been copied and reshaped for centuries.”
This recursive chain continues with Bernini’s David, which was inspired by the same Gladiator. Christian taps into this long lineage of appropriation, questioning at what point an artwork stops being a copy and becomes something new.
Merging, Morphing, Multiplying
Christian Holze’s installation at Art Rotterdam is a living archive where historical references, digital manipulation, and material transformation converge. Set within a modular aluminum structure reminiscent of museum storage racks, his works actively expose the fluid nature of art history. “Seeing the back of an artwork often tells you as much as the front. It’s about history, context, and the journey of an object.”
At the core of the installation is a 3D-fused sculpture of two versions of Dionysus, one attributed to Michelangelo, the other by an unknown artist. By merging them into a single entity, Christian forces the copy to encounter itself, dissolving the boundaries between original and reproduction. “The copy is confronted with its own copy. They blend into each other, and suddenly, authorship becomes unclear.”
Another work draws from Jens Adolf Jerichau’s 19th-century sculpture Panther Hunter, a piece that mimics the idealised forms of Greek antiquity. Holze worked with an existing 3D model of the sculpture, compressing and reshaping it into a painting, reversing the usual process of sculptural replication. Even its title shifts: “I flipped the title, it’s now Hunter Panther. A small shift, but enough to create a new context.”
The final piece stems from Holze’s series The Most Boring Artist I Know, a nod to Cy Twombly’s obsession with Raphael’s School of Athens. After years of reinterpreting the fresco, Twombly ultimately dismissed Raphael as “boring.” Holze, however, sees something else. “I liked that, the idea that boredom can only come from deep engagement. It’s not ignorance, it’s the exhaustion of fascination.”
These works do not stand in isolation. They interlock like fragments of a shifting timeline, questioning how meaning is shaped through repetition, reinterpretation, and the constant movement of images across centuries.
The Work That Reflects Its Space
Even the rooms his works are created in play a role in their final form. Christian stages his sculptures in digital 3D spaces before translating them into the physical world. The catch? The rooms themselves disappear, only their reflections remain on the sculptures.
“The surrounding space creates the image. The reflections on the surface capture the environment, but once printed, the room itself disappears, only its echoes remain.”
This is a perfect metaphor for his entire practice. His work doesn’t provide fixed answers. Instead, it holds up a mirror to the systems we take for granted and lets us reconsider what we think we know. At Art Rotterdam, that mirror is right in front of us.
Written by Emily Van Driessen
The New Art Section at Art Rotterdam 2025, curated by Övül Ö. Durmuşoğlu, brings together a selection of international galleries, each presenting a solo exhibition of an artist exploring innovative formal and material expressions. Among them, GALERIST (Istanbul) hosts a solo booth by Yeşim Akdeniz (b. 1978, Turkey) whose practice seamlessly fits within this framework.
Yeşim Akdeniz investigates how objects carry narratives and challenges the assumption that objects are neutral. By assembling industrial remnants, mass-produced items, and hand-crafted elements, she reveals the hidden social histories embedded in materials. Yeşim plays with the tension between the unique and the serial, the handmade and the mass-produced, the personal and the political.
“Materials contain information,” she explains. “I work with mass-produced goods and industrial remnants, but within those objects are hidden stories about labour, supply chains, and migration. They are silent witnesses of larger systems.”
Nothing in her work is straightforward: a carpet is not a carpet, a lamp is not just a lamp, and a self-portrait is not a self-portrait.
Self-Portrait as an Orientalist Carpet: A Tapestry of Meanings
In her ongoing series Self-Portrait as an Orientalist Carpet, Yeşim uses textiles to question the shifting power dynamics between East and West. The works resemble traditional Anatolian blankets, a craft passed down through generations but increasingly displaced by industrial production.
” The traditional blankets are handmade, labour-intensive, and expensive. With the rise of mass-produced alternatives, this has become a disappearing tradition,” Yeşim explains.
Despite their familiar appearance, her pieces are not conventional carpets: they integrate industrial details such as zips, buckles, and chains, creating an unexpected tension between couture and domesticity. “I call them carpets, but they are not carpets. They are supposed to be self-portraits, but they are not self-portraits,” she says. ” I am interested in the area between categories. What we think we recognise shifts the moment we look closer.”
The series directly engages with Orientalism, a concept articulated by Edward Said, describing how the West has historically romanticised and oversimplified ‘Eastern’ cultures. Yeşim’s work reflects, distorts, and questions these portrayals.
“There is this idea that the East is one single entity, just ‘the Orient’. Obviously, the East is not a single entity; it consists of many different cultures, belief systems, and layers. This kind of oversimplification is what creates many stereotypes,” she notes. Her textile works embrace these contradictions, challenging fixed definitions of culture, identity, and authenticity.
New Faces in Town: Lamps as a Reflection of Migration and Mass Industry
Alongside her textile works, Yeşim presents a series of lamps, where mass production and mobility converge. These sculptural objects combine factory-made shoes with an iron structure, while their base consists of a suitcase. The result is a hybrid piece: a lamp that is equally an image of migration, production, and displacement.
“I wanted to create a mix of serial production and craftsmanship,” she says. “These lamps are exactly that. They contain shoes that are mass-produced in Istanbul, but the metal parts are welded by hand. They exist at the intersection of functionality and absurdity.”
By using a suitcase as the base, Yeşim makes a direct reference to movement, both in a literal and symbolic sense. “It was important to me that these objects have an invisible presence. As if the shoes have just been left behind by someone who moved on, as if the object itself have been travelling.”
Like her textile pieces, the lamps blur the lines between the serial and the handmade, between design and sculpture. They evoke themes of labour migration, economic survival, and the silent presence of workers whose stories often remain untold.
What Does “New” Mean in a Time of Change?
The New Art Section at Art Rotterdam 2025 poses the question: What does ‘new’ mean in a time of significant social and cultural transformation? Yeşim’s work offers a powerful response:
“What I do is not necessarily new in the sense of creating something completely ‘original’,” she says. “I look at what already exists, what moves, what disappears. The new lies in how you look at it again.”
In a world where labour, production, and migration shape both people and objects, Yeşim Akdeniz’s work exposes the instability of what we call ‘new’ as she repurposes, reconfigures, and reveals.
Written by Emily Van Driessen
As part of Het Zuid Manifest: I Love Carlos, Rib is launching its own radio station together with residents and partners called The Last Terminal radio, which will be broadcast live from Intersections at Art Rotterdam from 27 to 30 March, daily between 11:00 and 19:00.
After 19:00 there will be a program of music, stories, and other contributions by artists such as Peter Fengler, Daniel Gustav Cramer, Michèle Matyn, Hedvig Koertz and Dieter Roth.
During the three days of the festival in Charlois, there will be artworks and performances to discover at various locations and you can participate in guided tours.
For the complete programming and participating artists: https://www.ribrib.nl/het-zuid-manifest
At Art Rotterdam, Stevenson presents an overview of work that Moshekwa Langa has created over the past 20 years, complemented by recent pieces. The South African artist’s work revolves around themes such as travel, belonging, displacement, memories, movement, and borders. Gallery owner Joost Bosland describes it as unique that so much work by an artist of Langa’s stature is still available. Next year, Langa will have a major exhibition at Melly that surveys his entire career.
That Moshekwa Langa addresses themes such as displacement, identity and inclusion/exclusion in his work is hardly surprising. These themes run like a thread through his life. Langa was born in 1975 in a place that did not officially exist. Bakenberg, a small village in northern South Africa, did not appear on any maps during Apartheid (1948–1994).
Bakenberg was part of Lebowa, one of ten so-called homelands whose maps only indicated the outer borders, while places within them were left blank. When Langa discovered this, it confused him, he says from his studio in central Amsterdam. So, it is no coincidence that fictional and incomplete maps frequently appear in his work.
His birthplace also plays a central role in his seminal work Where do I begin? from 2001. In the four-minute video, we see people boarding a bus along a dusty road from the perspective of a small child. Langa maintains a clear narrative: we see only a series of anonymous legs. Yet the images are rich in detail: a perfectly ironed pair of trousers next to worn-out shoes, a floral skirt, an umbrella, an overstuffed bag, stained clothes, a missing sock.
The phrase Where do I begin, taken from the song of the same name by Shirley Bassey, of which a fragment can be heard, suggests the start of a journey or a story. Combined with the repetitive movement, it reflects themes that frequently appear in Langa’s practice and life: travel, belonging, displacement, memory, identity, inclusion and exclusion, movement and borders. Where do I begin was acquired by Tate Modern in 2018.
International recognition
Due to the themes Langa explores in his work, he has long been in the international spotlight. His work has been featured at the Venice Biennale (2003 and 2009) and São Paulo Biennale (1998 and 2010), as well as biennales in Johannesburg, Istanbul and Havana (all in 1997), Gwangju (2000) and Berlin (2018). It is also part of collections at institutions like MoMA in New York and MHKA in Antwerp. Langa has also exhibited at Fondation Louis Vuitton and Fondation Kadist in Paris, MAXXI in Rome, the New Museum and International Center of Photography in New York, Kunsthalle Bern and the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. In the Netherlands, Langa has had exhibitions at Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen (1998) and in 2022, at The Hague’s KM21 with the telling title Omweg (Detour). Next year, Kunstinstituut Melly in Rotterdam will be joining this list. Despite this, Langa remains somewhat of an outsider in the Dutch art scene. “Who is this man who keeps showing up at openings?” asks Langa, jokingly downplaying his status.
A game of chance and texture
In addition to videos, Langa also works in different types of media, from drawings to photography and from collages to installations. He enjoys experimenting with simple materials such as salt, coffee, receipts, bubble wrap, pigments, cigarette butts, tape, Vaseline, maps, bleach, advertisements, corrugated iron, lacquer, plastic and charcoal.
Most of his work is done on paper. He creates them on the floor of his studio by applying paint in puddles, which extends the drying time and allows room for chance. The texture of his typically abstract works is therefore often thick. Langa layers materials in much the same way he layers meaning in his work.
Langa first came to the Netherlands in 1997 to participate in the Rijksakademie residency programme in Amsterdam. He stood out with work that combined text, sculpture and sound recordings. He initially planned to stay for three more months, but ended up returning to South Africa only intermittently. He had changed and no longer fit into Bakenberg. Amsterdam became his base, though he frequently worked in Paris, Berlin and London.
Missed rent
In 2017, Langa had two exhibitions in Paris, one at Fondation Louis Vuitton and the other at Fondation Kadist. He spent several months in the French capital setting up these exhibitions. This stay ultimately led to the loss of his Amsterdam studio—and with it, all the work he had created since first arriving in the Netherlands.
“I wasn’t earning much at the time, but what I always did was pay my rent in advance. For example, I would pay for the coming year, so I wouldn’t have to worry about it. Even when I left for Paris, I had paid in advance. But as it turned out, I had underpaid by one month. When I returned, I saw my entire studio in a container.” The container had been stored by Langa’s Belgian gallerists. Eventually, Stevenson managed to transfer the collection to Johannesburg. Gallery owner Bosland also recovered other lost work from Athens and London.
Now supplemented with new works, an initial selection from 1997–2017 is on display at Art Rotterdam in Stevenson’s booth. A Langa installation is also on view at the Kunstmuseum in The Hague as part of the New New Babylon: Visions for Another Tomorrow exhibition. It is the first Langa installation acquired by a Dutch museum. A broader overview of Langa’s work will follow in 2026 at Kunstinstituut Melly in Rotterdam.
Written by Wouter van den Eijkel
At Art Rotterdam’s Prospects section, Bianca Carague (b.1995, The Philippines) presents the sculpture, Ilog Maria Vessel (2023) and video Maria Islands (2023) from her immersive world Maria Islands (2023), a speculative future where the Philippines expands its territory using imported plastic waste. She creates immersive worlds that feel both serene and unsettling. Her work is dystopian in concept, yet visually soft and spiritual. “Even when I work with critical subjects, like climate change, power imbalance, or mental health, there’s always this softness in how I approach it. That’s just who I am,” she explains
What is the common thread in your practice?
Bianca’s work spans different media – gaming environments, video, sculpture- yet the core remains the same: storytelling through immersive, speculative futures. Her artistic journey began in furniture and interior design in the Philippines, but her desire to create socially engaged work led her to study Social Design at Design Academy Eindhoven. “I started my Master’s thinking I’d be designing things that help people and solve problems. But I quickly realised design isn’t always about fixing things, it can also be about questioning and reshaping narratives,” she says.
Her early projects focused on digital storytelling and interactive environments, but over time, she also felt the urge to bring those fictional worlds into a more tangible, physical dimension. “I think starting with digital made me crave something physical. First, I wanted to touch things. Then, I wanted to smell them. I kept expanding beyond the screen.”
How did you start exploring digital worlds?
During the COVID-19 pandemic, as lockdowns pushed interactions online, Bianca became fascinated with gaming as a space for mental health, emotional care, and spiritual connection. “I had no business playing Minecraft,” she laughs. “But I thought, what if therapy could happen inside a video game? What would that even look like?”
What started as an experiment quickly grew into something much larger and now is a virtual landscape of 3M+ sqm. She built a Minecraft server, Bump Galaxy (2020-2023), for mental health where different environments emerged in response to conversations with players and professionals. “There is a meditation forest where you could plant a tree and watch it grow while meditating, an underwater temple for hypnotherapy, even a snowfield with floating questions about love and relationships.”
While the project began as a response to practical constraints and isolation, it ultimately reshaped the way Bianca thinks about how digital worlds can influence human experience, a perspective that continues to inform her work today.
Your work is very participatory, not just in creation, but also in how it’s experienced. How do you approach that?
“I consider myself an introvert, but I love connecting with people through my work,” she says. Bianca’s work is constantly shaped by the people who interact with it. Whether through community-driven storytelling, gaming collaborations, or audience participation.
One of her participatory projects, Gen C: Children of 2050 (2022), invited young audiences to imagine future societies shaped by environmental change. Over three months, Bianca incorporated ideas from visitors into her work, evolving the exhibition through interactive workshops. In one session, participants entered a virtual simulation where they had to find creative ways to survive in an ocean full of plastic. Most of them immediately thought, ‘We could turn it into islands!’ That idea stuck with her and later became the foundation for Maria Islands. She first presented Maria Islands in 2023 at Nieuwe Instituut in Rotterdam.
When she decided to bring the project to the Philippines, it felt like a natural continuation, as it aligned with real issues the country struggles with. In Manila, she collaborated with fellow artist and studiomate Erik Peters, as well as other Filipino artists, to further develop its world and narrative in two more exhibitions
This participatory ethos extends beyond storytelling into multi-sensory experiences. “For Maria Islands, I also created a fragrance that mimicked what these plastic islands might smell like: ocean, salt, soil, burning tar, and artificial flowers. It was definitely interesting!,” she laughs.
Rather than simply observing, audiences become co-creators of the speculative futures she envisions. “Often, solutions are dictated from the top down. The people most affected by these issues rarely get a say in shaping their own futures. That’s where imagination becomes powerful.”
What will you be showing at Art Rotterdam?
At Prospects, Bianca presents a sculpture and a video from Maria Islands (2023), a project that reflects her personal connection between the Philippines and the Netherlands while addressing global power imbalances in waste distribution. “I’m from the Philippines, but I’ve spent years studying and working in the Netherlands. I wanted to create a project that resonates between these two places, not just personally, but in how they are connected through systems of consumption and waste.”
The video, Maria Islands (2023), speculates on a future where the Philippines expands its territory using imported plastic waste, referencing the real-world practice of Western nations offloading their waste onto the Global South. The Philippines, one of the largest recipients of plastic waste – much of it from the Netherlands – lacks the infrastructure to process the volumes it receives. “It makes no sense because, at the end of the day, waste doesn’t disappear, it becomes everyone’s problem. But in these global power structures, it’s the wealthier nations that get to dictate who bears that burden.”
Rather than simply exposing this imbalance, Maria Islands flips the power dynamic, imagining a future in a video where plastic becomes the foundation for nation-building. “What if, instead of being a symbol of environmental collapse, plastic waste became a resource? What if the Philippines, rather than being forced to absorb waste it can’t process, turned that into power, literally reshaping its territory, its economy, and its future?”
The sculpture, Ilog Maria Vessel (2023), brings this imagined world into physical form, allowing visitors to tangibly engage with her speculative landscape. The Mondrian Fund grant was instrumental in developing Maria Islands. “The grant gave me the opportunity to explore the geopolitical, cultural, and spiritual dimensions of what this speculative future could mean in greater depth.”
Written by Emily Van Driessen
