WARÚM DARÚM WARÚM DARÚM – ARTISTS

In Raw Footage (2006), Mik shows how normality and extremity in war situations are intertwined. He uses, for the first time in this work, existing documentary footage from the war in the former Yugoslavia: raw, unedited clips found in media archives such as Reuters and Independent Television News. Seeking different layers of reality, Mik focuses on the war with the goal of undermining the superficial and simultaneously “spectacular” images we know from mass media.

Biography
Aernout Mik (born 1962 in Groningen) comes from a background in sculpture, which gave new impetus to video art. His work has been exhibited worldwide – in Europe, Japan, and the United States – and in 2009 he held a solo exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

These objects are made of industrial hard foam and represent rockets, mortar shells and artillery shells that Israel has used in its current and past wars against Gaza. Most of them were manufactured in the United States. The models were downloaded from the internet, modified and cut out using a CNC machine. They were actually supposed to be connected to each other to create the final objects, but the artist decided to leave the objects separate to express his view that the current war in (On Gaza, not in Gaza) Gaza is a continuous, uninterrupted act of genocide committed by the Israeli army (By Israel, not Israeli Army). The work is intended to change its display form from place to place and can be expanded or reduced with additional objects in the future – it is therefore an active installation or sculpture. The weapons used in this exhibition are the Mark 83, part of the US-manufactured Mark 80 rocket series, or the (general-purpose) bombs and the US-manufactured 155 mm artillery shells, which are mainly used by Israeli tanks to destroy buildings from the ground. The work is untitled because the artist finds the current situation indescribable and wants to reflect on the state of shock and trauma caused by the ongoing Genocide in Gaza.

Biography
Hamza Badran (1993, Nablus) is a writer, visual artist and cultural creator and lives in Basel and Amsterdam. He holds a bachelor's degree in contemporary visual arts from the International Academy of Art Palestine in Ramallah and a master's degree from the University of Art and Design Northwestern Switzerland in Basel. He is currently an artist in residence at the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten in Amsterdam. He has participated in several art exhibitions worldwide, including the international art exhibition Documenta Fifteen in Kassel in 2022, the Swiss Art Awards exhibition in Basel in 2023, and Regionale 20 and 22. He was the winner of a two-year residency at the GGG Atelier in Basel from 2022 to 2024 and winner of the Kiefer Hablitzel │ Göhner Art Prize 2023 as part of the Swiss Art Awards. He is currently a member of Dar Yousuf Nasri Jacir for Art and Research in Bethlehem.

Carolien Scholtes
Since 2010 Carolien Scholtes has been making photographic and video works. She builds installations in her studio, photographs or films them, and then destroys them. Her work touches, in an inimitable way, on feelings of pain and time, yet somehow escapes them again. 

One could say there are two strands in her work. One deals more with the violent and absurdist sides of society; the other concerns the mystical world of the ineffable. Her installations and photographic works are composed of concrete materials such as carpet, vinyl, thread and clamps, but their meaning is altered, inverted and turned inside out, so that they become almost abstract while remaining charged.

In 2008 she suffered brain damage, which brought her life and her work as it had been to a halt. Until then she had worked as a scenographer, filmmaker, initiator of multidisciplinary projects and as a lecturer at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam. Elements of all those earlier disciplines play a major role in her current autonomous work.
Her autonomous work is included in the collections of Museum Boijmans van Beuningen, the Amsterdam UMC art collection and the Fondation Custodia in Paris.

Sanne Danz
“As a designer I am modest and commanding. I create monumental spaces that have a strong influence on the experience of those who inhabit them or look at them; at the same time they are spaces often taken for granted. Spaces that make room — for performers and for spectators, for imagination.” 

Danz has designed nearly two hundred sets for theatre, mime, dance and opera; for young and old, indoors and outdoors, in theatres, farm barns, factory halls and caravans. In 1989 she was a finalist for the Prix de Rome (Visual Arts & Theatre). Her work was part of the Dutch submission to the Prague Quadrennial (PQ) in 2003 and 2007 and was shown in various exhibitions on spatial design, including at the Netherlands Architecture Institute (NAi) in 2004. In addition, Danz works as an exhibition designer and as a lecturer in scenography at several art academies.

My Mom Wants to Go Back Home is a documentary diary by photographer Hanna Hrabarska. Together with her mother Iryna, she fled the war in Ukraine, to find a temporary home in the Netherlands.’This photo project is a journey. In the beginning it runs across borders, countries and cities. Later it extends inwards, into a landscape of our thoughts, feelings and emotions’. Through her lens, Hanna captures the story of her mother forced to leave their country in the face of war. In 2024, after being showcased in numerous galleries and museums around the world, this quiet and intimate personal story of becoming a war refugee has reached even a bigger audience in the shape of a photo book.

Biography
Hanna Hrabarska (1986) is an independent photographer, artist and educator from Ukraine, based in Amsterdam. 
She works at the intersection of many photographic genres, techniques and formats, mainly focusing on conceptual and contemporary documentary projects.

Over the last decade she has established herself as a freelance photographer, photojournalist and documentary artist — with both commissioned and autonomous work. She holds a Master of Arts degree in Journalism from the National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy, Kyiv (2010). In the course of her now fourteen-year career in photography, Hanna’s work was published in numerous media outlets and exhibited in galleries and museums around the world. Her recent  project “My mom wants to go back home” — about the experience of fleeing from Ukraine — was released in the Netherlands in 2024 as a photography book. 

SLow is a performance that shows the defenceless human body surrounded by machines, systems, etc. Karel noticed that in Taiwan, like in other Asian countries, there are strict rules people (have to) live by, and that these rules can not be easily put aside.
Slowly but imperturbable the boy in the video follows his own path. Using an invisible electric tackle he drags himself in an even tempo through the Taiwanese urban landscape, marking in an entertaining and wondrous way the contrast between the route of the defenceless human body and the hectic world surrounding it.

Credits SLow
Performance by Karel van Laere
Director of Photography 李少哲
Line Producer 凌瑋隆
Assistence 莊皓巖 & Trixie Ballesteros
Special thanks 莊陳保, 鄭敬儒, 葉柏青, 孫斌立, 劉錫權, 陳愷璜 , 榮工工程公司 關渡施工所, 台北市
北投區關渡宮, 台北市關渡國小.

Biography
My work is best described as a combination between performance and video art. Due to my mixed background in performing and visual arts, I work in a multidisciplinary way. A central theme in my work is the tension between the human body and technological systems. This ongoing dialogue often leads me to ask fundamental questions that form the foundation of my projects. Collaboration is a key part of my practice. Over the years, I’ve worked with professionals from a wide range of fields, including surgeons, firefighters, a massage therapist, an anesthesiologist, actors, dancers and a hypnotherapist. These collaborations open up new perspectives for my work and help me reach diverse audiences.

La Chimera rises in space as both inviting and inaccessible, a passage as well as a threshold. From a distance, the sculpture appears architectural and weighty, yet up close the surface comes alive and feels tactile: traces of hands, slabs of clay, and gestures emerge. This physical immediacy reflects Geerts’ intensely physical process, in which body and mind serve as the medium through which gestures and traces are captured. What seems massive is hollow not a heavy block of clay but a lightweight resin shell where monumentality gives way to vulnerability, weight reveals itself as façade, and the form becomes only a memory of a former form. The sculpture is supported by a frame of scaffolding tubes, reminiscent of advertising and propaganda structures, creating a clear distinction between front and back. In La Chimera, this approach manifests in the weaving of personal narratives into universal themes. The work challenges what we take as permanent, uncovers the indeterminate and elusive nature of reality, and encourages viewers to question their assumptions and engage with space in new ways. wijzen te benaderen.

Biography
Krystel Geerts is an interdisciplinary artist and current resident at the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten in Amsterdam. Working primarily through sculpture, she engages in an intensely physical process that brings material and form into tension.

Her sculptures weave personal narratives into universal themes, creating spaces for both reflection and dialogue. They often challenge what we take as permanent, uncovering the indeterminate and elusive nature of reality. Frequently fragmented or distorted, her forms echo the fragile ways in which perception itself is shaped, fractured, and reimagined.

Biography
Marieke Coppens (born 1980) is a visual artist, social psychologist, “failed” comedian, researcher, tutor, guru, and writer. She studied at institutions including OTIS College of Art and Design in Los Angeles, the Sandberg Institute, and the University of Amsterdam. In her practice, the “spokesperson” for each work is always a different material. She also produces books; for example, her book Niet het uiterlijk voor goede vriendschappen net als de tongen van de honden is included in various collections, including that of CODA. The Textiel Museum, Museum CODA, FOAM, SCHUNCK, and Museum Jan Cunen have exhibited her work. She prefers to present her work outside of institutional and traditional art settings.

A performance with table, chairs, hands, massage oil, flowers, and a livestreaming phone | 12–15 minutes per session | 2018/2019/2025

In Hand Massage, the artist offers participants a simple act of care: a hand massage. For the duration of the session, conversation and touch unfold like a duet—an intimate exchange that draws attention to the space we share and the time we inhabit together.

From the perspective of deep time, human existence is almost weightless, fleeting against the scale of rocks, oceans, and stars. Yet within that vastness, the pressure of another’s hand in ours becomes undeniable. This encounter—however brief—carries significance, because it truly happens. It exists in the body, and thus enters eternity, even if memory erases it.

The performance holds this paradox: fragility and permanence, the ephemeral and the geological. A livestream camera focuses only on the participants’ hands, amplifying the moment of intimacy while also displacing it—expanding the encounter outward into the immaterial space of the internet. Intimacy is preserved and betrayed at once, multiplied beyond the room.

Hand Massage reveals intimacy as both local and infinite, both vulnerable and indelible. What occurs in the pressure of a touch is inseparable from the vastness of time, and what is livestreamed is inseparable from the universe it enters. In this spatial-temporal paradox, even the most fleeting gesture becomes part of a continuum that endures.

Performed at Hospitalfield (Scotland), 1646 (Den Haag, the Netherlands), V2_ (Rotterdam, the Netherlands), and ACPA Conference (Leiden University), 2019.

Just One Look, and She Turned Into a Pillar of Salt

Lecture Performance with Storytelling, Poetry-Reading, Sound, Hypnosis, and Projection
Duration: around 60 minutes

The biblical story of Lot’s wife has long inspired artistic and literary reinterpretation. In Just One Look, and She Turned Into a Pillar of Salt, Mel Chan revisits this ancient narrative through a lecture performance blending music, hypnosis, video, storytelling, and poetry.

The performance centers on a haunting question: What did Lot’s wife last see before she turned into a pillar of salt? Why was the sight of mass destruction so compelling that she risked her life for a final glance? Classical theology frames her act as defiant disobedience, punished by petrification. In contrast, Chan reimagines her gesture as an act of resistance, courage, and profound empathy.

Through this performance, Chan invites the audience to inhabit the perspective of Lot’s wife—a nameless figure stripped of agency and identity. Her backward glance becomes a radical act: a refusal to avert her eyes from suffering, a confrontation with unbearable truth, and a surrender to transformation. This final gaze transcends personal survival, merging her being with nature’s elemental force.

By interweaving hypnosis, poetic language, and evocative visual storytelling, the performance constructs a space where memory, myth, and possibility converge. Lot’s wife’s fateful look becomes not a symbol of failure but a testament to empathy, defiance, and ultimate metamorphosis.

Biography
Born in Hong Kong and based in the Netherlands, Mel Chan creates participatory, poetic, and reflective artworks that navigate the ruins of colonialism, neocolonialism, and ecological crises. Her practice, encompassing painting, video, storytelling, hypnotherapy, and performance, explores how to coexist with uncertainty and find hope amid dystopia. Chan has exhibited and performed widely in the Netherlands at Platform POST, Willem Twee Kunstruimte, 1646, Brutus, Kunstinstituut Melly, V2_, MOYA, De Balie, and Museum Boijmans van Beuningen. She holds an MFA with Distinction in Artistic Research from the Royal Academy of Art The Hague and a BA in Philosophy and Comparative Literature from The University of Hong Kong.

185 x 95 x 195 cm | Materials: fired clay, steel, steel wire mesh, motor, and mixed media

This durational artwork is a kinetic sculpture that gradually destroys itself in the process of fulfilling its intended function. It comprises a platform, a metal frame, a wire mesh enclosure, a series of ceramic blades, a motor, and a gear system – all integrated into a single functioning mechanism. As the system operates, the blades shred ceramic objects periodically fed into it, while simultaneously eroding and damaging themselves in the process, continuing until the final clay component is shattered. The work explores
destruction through the inherent fragility of clay. Ultimately, it invites reflection on the many forms of collapse, echoing rhythms of violence that are systematic, repetitive, and self-consuming.

Biography
Nataliya Zuban was born in 1992 in Opishnia, Ukraine. She received both her MFA and BFA from the Lviv National Academy of Arts, Ukraine, in 2015 and 2013, respectively. In 2021, she earned her Interdisciplinary PhD from the Eugeniusz Geppert Academy of Art and Design in Wroclaw, Poland. Zuban has participated in residency programs at the Ceramic Creative Center in Clayarch Gimhae Museum, South Korea; European Ceramic Work Center and the Rijksakademie van 

Beeldende Kunsten, the Netherlands.Nataliya Zuban’s works have been exhibited nationally and internationally and are included in prestigious collections at institutions such as the Ariana Museum (CH), Keramikmuseum Westerwald (DE), FuLe International Ceramic Art Museum FLICAM (CN), Vallauris Institute of Arts (FR), Museu de Ceràmica de l’Alcora (ES), Centre of Polish Sculpture in Oronsko (PL), and the National Museum of Ukrainian Pottery (UA).

Created just after October 7, 2023, artist Tina Farifteh’s installation ik en jij (“I and You”) consisted of a phone booth where people could anonymously share thoughts and feelings about Israel and Palestine. After speaking, each visitor could listen via headphones to what others had shared. It was an attempt to enable a “delayed conversation” amid heated debates – a space where people could share and listen but not immediately respond.

Hundreds of people spoke into the booth: they talked, shouted, whispered, cried, asked themselves questions, or remained silent. The installation was placed at various locations in Amsterdam until May 2024, when Farifteh stopped recording. The voices began to overwhelm her; despair, anger, and fear grew with each passing month, and she wondered what more there was to say.

Radio producer Laura Stek created a compilation of all the anonymous voices along with Farifteh’s own voice sharing her reflections. The installation ik en jij was produced and supported by Prospektor and the Amsterdam May 4 and 5 Committee, and research related to the installation was part of the 2023–2024 Dutch Film Festival Fellowship Programme.

Research, concept and installation design: Tina Farifteh
Audio editing: Laura Stek
Creative producer: Eefje Blankevoort
Executive producer: Laura Verduijn
Final mix: Arno Peeters
Music: Darius Timmer, Anna Meredith, Amon Tobin
Illustration: Isa Grütter
Installation technician: Arran Lyon
Producer: Prospektor
Final editing: NTR, Ottoline Rijks

Biography
Tina Farifteh is an Iranian-Dutch visual artist based in the Netherlands. She obtained Master’s Degrees from the Erasmus University in Rotterdam and a Bachelor’s Degree from the Royal Academy of Arts in The Hague. Thanks to this academic and cultural background, she is used to seeing the world from different angles. In her work, she reflects on how man-made power structures such as nation states and corporations impact the lives of ordinary people. Often focusing on people not only excluded from the privileges granted by the dominant political and economic systems, but also damaged by these to make the system ‘work’. Central to her work is the role of images and how these influence our thoughts, emotions and behaviour.
        Her photographic approach is research-based and conceptual and often combines images, audio, text and data. She seduces us into looking at topics we prefer to look away from, because of their complexity or discomfort. In her photographic project Killer Skies (2018), she explored the impact of the ‘dronization’ of armies. For her audiovisual installation The Flood (2021) she carried out extensive research into the situation of refugees on the move or stuck at European borders, as well as the political language used to dehumanise and frame refugees as a ‘natural disaster’, normalising the absurdity of how we currently treat them.
        Farifteh graduated with honours from The Royal Academy of Arts, The Hague and is a member of Futures, a European photography platform that brings together talents and expertise. She has won the Royal Academy Bachelor Award, Fotofestival Naarden Talent Award and second prize in the De Zilveren Camera photography awards, in the Storytelling category. In 2023 she was one of the selected artists for NFF Fellowship 2023.