News

The Horizon 2020 project WaterLANDS (Water-based Solutions for Carbon Storage, People, and Wilderness) has selected six artists to complete a 4-year part-time placement as part of the WaterLANDS Artistic Engagement Residency. EU Horizon has funded the selection of six artists to each reflect on one of six different ecological restoration sites in Europe as part of the large-scale and ambitious project ‘WaterLANDS‘ (2023-2026).

Marjolijn Dijkman develops ‘Turbid Tides’ in relation to one of these six sites, reflecting on ecological restoration and depoldering in the context of the Ems-Dollard estuary and the surrounding landscape in the North of the Netherlands. This will lead to presentations in 2026 and 2027.

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The exhibition project Botanizing the Asphalt explores the political role of light in urban spaces at night. Examining the materiality of night and its sensorial, normative, and atmospheric aspects, the potential of the nocturnal as a community meeting space unfolds against the backdrop of pressing social, ecological, and political contexts. The title of the exhibition is inspired by Walter Benjamin’s description (1938) of how the flâneur experiences the city emotionally while wandering the streets, using an allegorical connection to nature. In this manner, the show traces dreamlike forms of meditation on resistance, memory, identity, and place – and thereby opens a broader discourse on the power dynamics embedded in light and dark, visibility and obscurity, the observer and observed.

Artists: Ana Vaz, Alexandre Estrela, Anna Schachinger, Haig Aivazian, Hugo de Almeida Pinho, Jonathan Uliel Saldanha, Marjolijn Dijkman, Pedro Henriques, Younes Ben Slimane. Curated by Sara Castelo Branco.

Additional: ‘Electrify Everything’, performed live by Pom Bouvier b. and Marjolijn Dijkman on the 9th of November.

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Marjolijn Dijkman will conceive the fourth exhibition in the annual programme ‘TERRA DIASPORA’ with curator Stephan Klee. The solo presentation will feature three different bodies of work, including a series of new productions.

The immersive setting of ‘Between the Lines’ will guide the audience through these impressive installations of geo-topographical processes across the 392 square meters of the Altes Rathaus. The exhibition will focus on water systems, rare earth elements, and the current state of a former WWI battlefield, highlighting the fault lines between political territories.

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Organised by LUCA’s Arts & Society expertise network, ENACT Festival presents innovative forms of transmission of research methodologies – from LUNÄ Talks, costumed round-table enactments, reworkings of oral traditions of song and storytelling, to radio essay as a research and expository medium.

The LUNÄ Talk on November 5th, on a full moon, will explore how Enlightenment thought, the Industrial Revolution, and colonization have shaped and influenced water bodies, tracing their material and immaterial residues in sediment and flow. The discussion will critically address current practices of water “management” and the paradigm shifts needed to restore both aquatic ecosystems and our relations with the more-than-human world.

Contributors: Merve Bedir, Marjolijn Dijkman, Ifor Duncan, Shivant Jhagroe, Annelies Kuypers
Hosts: Marjolijn Dijkman and Maarten Vanden Eynde

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The group exhibition exposes different ways where exhaustion in the broadest sense is used as a tool and method of colonial power and capitalist systems. Here, exhaustion is not just a metaphorical or psychological consequence. It is structural, imposed, and weaponized by systems of domination which exhaust humans amongst other natural resources to the point of annihilation.

With: Tala Abdalhadi; Diana Al-Halabi; Moses Maerz; Naomi Rincón-Gallardo; Sara Sallam; Firas Shehadeh; Jean Katambayi/Sammy Baloji/Daddy Tshikaya/Marjolijn Dijkman

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This seminar creates a public forum that brings together international scholars and artists from a plurality of backgrounds. It addresses the significant shift that is currently taking place across the sciences and arts, challenging binary distinctions such as nature–culture, human–nonhuman, mind–matter, reason–emotion and subject–object. Within the humanities and social sciences, this shift is often referred to as the ‘relational turn’. Rather than emphasising human exceptionalism, it problematises this notion and instead highlights interconnectedness, mutuality, kinship and the entanglement of all beings within complex ecological and cosmological networks.

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Bioart Society’s eight Field_Notes field laboratory, Field_Notes – Living Methodologies, responds to shifts in the field of art and science insisting that how we research matters.

Half of the working group are invited experts, including theorist, researcher and artist Anastasia (A) Alevtin, artist-researcher Sam Nightingale, practice-led cultural theorist Astrida Neimanis, veterinary pathologist and researcher Aleksija Neimanis, and artist and researcher Leena Valkeapää.

Other half of the group consists of professionals who applied to the open call we facilitated earlier this Spring, including researcher Ellie Ballantine, research-based multidisciplinary artist Marjolijn Dijkman, visual artist and researcher Hanna Husberg, audio sculptress, sound artist & curator/facilitator Antye Greie-Ripatti (AGF), architect Camille Sineau, visual artist Taylor Alaina Liebenstein Smith, designer/researcher Manuel Díaz Tufinio, and the Zettel & Sivanesan duo.

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The central group exhibition of the second year of TERRA DIASPORA, titled Active Terrain, follows as the second project and brings together thirteen contemporary artistic positions in the exhibition spaces of the Altes Rathaus Göttingen. This exhibition is dedicated to the perceptual deficit humans experience regarding terrestrial transformation.

With: Julius von Bismarck, Julian Charrière, Marjolijn Dijkman, Raphaël Fischer-Dieskau, Andreas Greiner, Robert Gschwantner, Spiros Hadjidjanos, Kapwani Kiwanga, Almut Linde, Ulrike Mohr, Mazenett Quiroga, Marike Schuurman, Raul Walch.

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Bringing together perspectives from contemporary art, forestry, and the humanities, Forest Encounters approaches the forest as more than a site of ecological inquiry. It is framed as a complex socio-political terrain, shaped by conflicting policies, cultural narratives, and economic interests, while also remaining a vital, living biodiverse space.

Amid escalating climate, environmental, and political crises, the exhibition invites a critical rethinking of our relationship with forests. Acknowledging more than human perspective, Forest Encounters unfolds through artistic research projects, workshops, storytelling, and film screenings. Moving between real and imagined forests, it situates the forest as both a natural entity and a contested cultural landscape.

With: Nayari Castillo & Reni Hofmüller, Marjolijn Dijkman, Polonca Lovšin, It Rains Differently with contributions by: Dušica Dražić, Monika Lang, Siniša Ilić, Ibis Ćerimagić and Jelena Vukićević

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Second walk in the series with Marjolijn Dijkman, Carla Alma and Lotte Jensen. ‘Waker, Slaper, Dromer’ (Watcher, Sleeper, Dreamer) is a series of three walks named after the poetic names and functions of dike systems in the Netherlands.

These events connect artistic research, dike construction, ecology, philosophy and regional history and offer an in-depth look at the landscape through contributions from various experts, each with their unique and local knowledge. These walks are organized as part of Dijkman’s WaterLANDS artist residency.

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The 7th issue of Commodity Frontiers is now live on our new journal website.

The issue explores carbon frontiers through carbon histories, carbon technocracy, carbon sovereignty, carbon financing, carbon credits, carbon offsets, and carbon capture and storage.

Multidisciplinary authors take us on a journey through carbon debates and conflicts (Shin and Jackson), from energy use and resilience in colonized India (Sayako Kanda) to carbon and state power in 19th century East Asia (Bartoletti, Coghe, and Seow) to agricultural education in the Central Valley in present-day California (Gharibian and Cruz). We read about carbon financing and violence in the rangelands of Northern Kenya (Atieno Owino), the invisibilized and exploited labor of “decarbonization” in Indonesia’s palm oil industry (Roswaldy and Sawit Women’s Education Group), and the false promises of carbon capture and storage in Norway (Dijkman and Ressler). Julia Loginova reviews Andrew Curley’s book, Carbon Sovereignty: Coal, development, and energy transition in the Navajo Nation. The issue also includes an in-depth article about the metal mining giant, Zijin, by Joan Martinez-Alier and Marcel Llavero-Pasquina from the EJAtlas.

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This ARIA seminar will be dedicated to interdisciplinary research and the arts, with a special focus on collaboration between the arts and the exact sciences.

The seminar aims to foster collaboration and position ARIA as an active partner in interdisciplinary research projects that engage with pressing societal challenges such as ecology, health, and technology.

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The WaterLANDS Artists-in-Residence and team gathered in person for the second time at the WaterLANDS General Assembly, held in Leeds. Our hosts, Laura Harrington, Fiona MacDonald (Feral Practice), and Joshua Cohen (an anthropologist from the University of Leeds), guided us around Malham Tarn, an upland blanket bog in the Yorkshire Dales National Park.

Now mid-way through the residency, each of the artists from the six sites shared insights into their processes and work during a dedicated session at the General Assembly. They also outlined their plans for the remainder of the residency, which has been ongoing for the past two years and will culminate in 2026 at the conclusion of the project.

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The sculptural installation ‘Liquid Properties’ will be part of ‘Expo #5: 1-4′ at LINK, a group exhibition with Krystel Geerts, Nikki Vroom, Marjolijn Dijkman & Toril Johannessen, and Rutger de Vries.

‘Liquid Properties’ consists of hand-blown glass objects in a variety of shapes, reminiscing of lab equipment, glassware, buoys, ecospheres, and water lenses. Each of the spheres has one or more lenses integrated into the glass body, slightly magnifying the organisms, particles, and pollutants inside. Studied up close, each glass sphere is an isolated ecosystem. As a total installation, they might remind of models within a taxonomic structure or even globes within a planetary system.

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10.02.2025
Planetary Poetics, Artist Talks 2025, Sandberg Institute, Amsterdam, NL
17:00 at the Theory Stairs

26.02.2025
Artist Talk, Technology Driven Art, ZUYD, Maastricht, NL
14:00 Grote zaal, Toneelacademie Maastricht

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Six Samples of Catastrophe examines the representational, aesthetic, and tactile qualities of materials as visible imprints of invisible or less visible human interventions into the life of matter and nature. They manifest in a range from political hegemonies to ecological disasters, and speak of extractivist policies and (neo)colonialism.

Artists: Hannes Boeck, Marjolijn Dijkman, Jassem Hindi & Sina Seifee, Davor Konjikusic, Ana Torfs

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For the first time since the Flemish Government acquired ‘Navigating Polarities’, it will be on display at Mu.ZEE as part of the new collection presentation.

“Navigating Polarities, an immersive film installation, investigates the history of navigation and the natural forces of polarity and magnetism in the physical world. The work takes the Earth’s geomagnetic field as a starting point, considering how micro- and macrocosmic elements are contingent on these properties to operate”.

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Everything shifts. Everything is being shifted. Alongside larger geosocial and geopolitical translocations of peoples and matter come daily shifts that remain unnoticed, yet often become agents of critical transformation, openness and new beginnings. By exploring these smaller movements of matter, form and meaning, Critical Shifts offers two techniques of following subtle alternations, impalpable variations, and illusive temporalities of constant change – extraction and  bias.

The exhibition showcases works of contemporary artists who embrace shifts – whether through material, metaphorical or invisible form– as a method of their diverse practices and consider extraction and bias as internal to any knowledge production. We navigate if by shifts.

Curated by Margarita Osepyan, Maria Korolkova and Kate Umnova.

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Monument Algae is a work in progress by Marjolijn Dijkman & Toril Johannessen on the role of algae in the biodeterioration of monuments. It aims to develop a living sculpture hosting an assembly of algae collected from historical monuments.

Algae biofilm can function as a bioprotector or deteriorator on stone surfaces. Which algae grow on what monuments, and are they protecting them or slowly taking them down?

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‘Waker, Slaper, Dromer’ (Watcher, Sleeper, Dreamer) is a series of three walks named after the poetic names and functions of dike systems in the Netherlands. These walks are organized by artist Marjolijn Dijkman as part of her WaterLANDS artist residency (2023-2026), which focuses on ecological restoration and depoldering in the context of the Ems-Dollard estuary in the North of the Netherlands.

During the first joint walk, ‘De Waker’ (The Watcher), together with artist Marjolijn Dijkman, botanical archeologist Mans Schepers and landscape philosopher Eric Brinckmann, we look at elements in the newly shaped Twin Dyke landscape and the broader context of the estuary and interpret it from the perspective of the watcher in a broad sense.

How does this newly formed landscape affect our relationship with this environment and the uncontrolled estuary beyond the dikes? What can we learn from this new landscape, and how does it relate to the past of Groningen with mound communities that lived in the salt marshes? (Dutch only)

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New website for ‘Waker, Slaper, Dromer’ (Watcher, Sleeper, Dreamer), a series of three walks named after the poetic names and functions of dike systems in the Netherlands. Here, the ‘watcher’ protects against the outside water first, and the inland ‘sleeper’ catches any breach. Behind this sleeper sometimes lies another ‘dreamer.’

These walks are organized by artist Marjolijn Dijkman as part of her WaterLANDS artist residency (2023-2026). She reflects on ecological restoration and depoldering in the context of the Ems-Dollard estuary and surrounding landscape in the North of the Netherlands.

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Why is land art particularly relevant today? What are its new manifestations? How do we deal with these often impermanent works of art? And how does land art shed light on the urgent ecological and social issues of today?

International conference on the future of land art, with Humberto Moro of the Dia Art Foundation (USA), Lisa Le Feuvre of the Holt/Smithson Foundation (USA), Britta Peters of Urbane Künste Ruth (GER) and many others.

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CurieuCity cultivates curiosity and wonder in everything that surrounds us individually and collectively. It’s a festival that aims to combine the scientific rigor of universities with the experiential impact of art, STEAM education (Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, and Mathematics), and socio-cultural action.

Each edition of the festival often addresses a question inspired by the reality of the neighborhood where it is located. The next iteration delves into the world of water, biodiversity, and natural sciences in the Wiels Swamp neighborhood.

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