
Guest curator Nina Folkersma Photo Amsterdam Museum Daphne Lucker
Guest curator Nina Folkersma
“In 2025, society will be facing major issues such as climate change, social inequality, and shifts in global power. This calls for new perspectives.” – Nina Folkersma, guest curator of Refresh Amsterdam #3.
According to Nina, artists are the antennae of society and experts in depicting new visions. In her role as curator, she looks for ways in which art helps us to see the future not as a fixed fact, but as a dynamic and changing scenario in which we can all play a role.
The Amsterdam Museum commissioned fifteen contemporary artists (collectives) with a connection to the city to create new work. From different creative disciplines, they offer their personal view of the future. They encourage visitors not to see the future as a fixed fact, but as one of many possible scenarios in which you yourself play a role.

Refresh Amsterdam 3 Photo Amsterdam Museum Gert Jan van Rooij
The 15 Artists and their works
The exhibition features works by visual artists, designers, filmmakers, photographers, writers, dancers, and performers.
Some artists explore a utopian world in which community spirit and connection with nature are central. Others draw attention to the past: after all, you must first understand where you come from before you can know where you want to go. There are creators who focus on the apocalyptic aspects of the future. And creators for whom hope and optimism are the most important things when they think about the future. In alphabetical order:
4Siblings Collective (established 2018)
4Siblings is a queer eco-feminist art and research collective. Especially for Refresh Amsterdam #3, 4Siblings researched potential future heirloom seeds of Amsterdam. They befriended and spoke with artists, farmers, and gardeners and asked them to share stories about their favorite seeds. These stories are presented through a colorful collection of runner beans, sunflower seeds, and corn kernels. Together the anecdotes and images tell a science fiction story about the future use of Amsterdam’s seeds.

4 Siblings Collective Photo Amsterdam Museum Daphne Lucker

Future Seeds for Amsterdam 2025 Photo Amsterdam Museum Gert Jan van Rooij
Frank Ammerlaan (1979, Netherlands)
For his new works for Refresh Amsterdam #3, Frank Ammerlaan drew inspiration from the book Orbital by Samantha Harvey, a poetic and philosophical story about planet Earth from the viewpoint of six astronauts inside an orbital space station. He presents patchwork paintings made from sewn together pieces of cotton and linen. Some of the cloths were soaked by rain or soiled with dust particles and earth in the open air. In others he incorporated meteorite particles. The fabrics appear faded, as if by sunlight, reminiscent of the passage of time. His work is about the “bigger picture”: the realization that everything is forever changing and in motion.

Frank Ammerlaan Bleachers 2025 Photo Amsterdam Museum Gert Jan van Rooij
Sebastián Díaz Morales (1975, Argentina)
Monday of the month at 12 o’clock. Serene moments blend with the loud, howling sound of the air raid siren that warned of bombardments during the Second World War. Today, wars still rage in other countries, but when the alarm sounds in Amsterdam, life continues as usual. The air raid siren in its current form will probably be terminated at the end of 2025. The work by Díaz Morales is a farewell salute to an alarm that no longer sounds the alarm.
In addition, Díaz Morales shows the work One Eye Melting, a video projection of a moving eye. The pupil reflects catastrophes (wars, natural disasters, accidents) and moments of renewal (growing microorganisms, the expanding cosmos, new technologies). The video work shows how destruction and rebirth are deeply connected. Total collapse is not just an ending but also an opportunity to reimagine the future.

Sebastián Díaz Morales One Glass Eye Melting 2024 2025 Photo Amsterdam Museum Gert Jan van Rooij
Ivna Esajas
The works by Ivna Esajas lie somewhere between drawings and paintings. They are representations of people, executed with elegant lines and almost transparent colors. The figures form a unit, intimately intertwined, leaving the viewer guessing as to which body a face, arm, or leg belongs. The individual here is always a “we.” Esajas’s works arise from intuition and are inspired by poetry, literature, myths, and everyday life. She draws connections between present and past in her work, between stories and floating memories. In May 2025, Esajas won the thirteenth edition of the ABN AMRO Art Prize.

Ivna Esajas in Refresh Amsterdam 3 Photo Amsterdam Museum Gert Jan van Rooij
Koen Hauser (1972, Netherlands)
Koen Hauser conjures through photographic images. He takes inspiration from the richly decorated buildings seen in Amsterdam’s city center, in particular buildings in the style of the Amsterdam School. Hauser translates photographic images into architectural elements and ornaments. These ornaments are in turn based on medical photography. In this way he transforms the original associations with pain, illness, loss, and trauma into a healing experience of beauty and comfort.

Koen Hauser Photo Amsterdam Museum Daphne Lucker

Koen Hauser Theatrum Mnemosynes 2025 Photo Amsterdam Museum Gert Jan van Rooij
Ischa Kempka (1995, Netherlands)
Ischa Kempka’s work is inspired by an archive of images and texts, often with links to feminism, mythology, and archaeology. Her new work, He was right about nothing (2025), consists of a gate made from stacked ceramic vases full of symbolic signs. The signs are derived from medieval symbols, or refer to a more recent chapter in history, such as the Amsterdam feminist Wilhelmina Drucker and the Dolle Minas women’s movement. With the work, Kempka invites visitors to look to the past, and from there to work on the changes we want to see in the future.

Ischa Kempka Photo Amsterdam Museum Daphne Lucker

Ischa Kempka He was right about nothing 2025 Photo Amsterdam Museum Gert Jan van Rooij
Minne Kersten (1993, Netherlands)
The video work The Same Room (2023) by Minne Kersten shows a vacated, cluttered bedroom that is slowly filling with water. The flooded room elicits visions of disasters and water’s destructive power. But also a feeling of calm after the storm. The work invites us to think about the end as a transitional state, rather than something definitive.

Minne Kersten The Same Roomstill 6msterdam 3 Foto Amsterdam Museum Gert Jan van Rooij
Natascha Libbert (1973, Netherlands)
In Natasch Libbert’s photographs, the destructive power of nature and humankind is often portrayed. Her images show the diverse ways in which we interact with the Earth. Among the things Libbert presents in Refresh Amsterdam #3 is a large-format photo of a piece of debris from a Boeing 747. Once called the Queen of the Skies, this giant airliner now sits in aircraft graveyards, reduced to scrap metal. Libbert focuses on moments of destruction, yet always with an eye for the potential of restoration.

Natascha Libbert Isla Bonita 2022 Photo Amsterdam Museum Gert Jan van Rooij
Brigitte Louter (1996, Netherlands)
Brigitte Louter creates installations, sculptures, and drawings. She is interested in the human drive to structure, measure, and map a world that often does not resonate with a desire for order and simplicity. In the exhibition she begins with an average filing cabinet. Behind the cabinet is a thought model in which drawings of events and experiences in the city that are difficult to measure can be seen. These are sort of like subjective maps of Amsterdam, which form a very specific and open system. Louter sees the installation as a distinctive dataset, offering it as a way to think about the future of the daily use, classification, and archiving of data.
(Photo art follows)

Brigitte Louter Photo Amsterdam Museum Daphne Lucker

Brigitte Louter Data Body in a Floodlight 2025 Photo Amsterdam Museum Francoise Bolechowski 2
Fiona Lutjenhuis (1991, Netherlands)
Fiona Lutjenhuis made two new drawings for Refresh Amsterdam #3. The diptych, executed in warm pastel hues, depicts a mystical world in which the earthly and the supernatural flow through each other. The drawings show a fantastical landscape filled with mushrooms, a reference to decay and mortality, and eggs, a symbol of birth and new life. Together the drawings form a narrative about the destruction of life and rebirth after death. Like Siwani, Lutjenhuis has been nominated for the prestigious Prix de Rome Visual Arts 2025. Two of the four nominated artists will participate in Refresh Amsterdam #3: Imagine the Future at the Amsterdam Museum.

Fiona Lutjenhuis Buried Born and Buried 2025 Photo Amsterdam Museum Gert Jan van Rooij
Roshanak and Afagh Morrowatian (1989 and 1984, Iran)
Iranian-born Roshanak Morrowatian works as a dancer, choreographer, and performer. Together with her sister, Afagh Morrowatian, a visual artist and photographer, she made a video for Refresh Amsterdam #3 entitled Protagonist (2025). In the video, a woman moves through the rooms and corridors of the Willet-Holthuysen House. The woman’s body appears to be a decorative object within the stately canal house, but gradually shifts from accessory to main character, the protagonist in her own life. Afagh and Roshanak Morrowatian explore what it means to be a body in diaspora. The video depicts breaking old patterns and laying claim to one’s own place.

Afagh Morrowatian Roshanak Morrowatian Protagonist 2025 Photo Amsterdam Museum Gert Jan van Rooij
Buhlebezwe Siwani (1987, South Africa)
Buhlebezwe Siwani is an initiated sangoma (spiritual healer) and multidisciplinary artist whose work focuses on the Black female body and African spirituality. Siwani has moved between Cape Town and Amsterdam for four years. For Refresh Amsterdam #3: Imagine the Future, Siwani, together with a diverse group of children from all parts of Amsterdam (ages 6 to 11), created four large drawings in which the perspective of the children is foremost. How do these children see the future? Siwani has been nominated for the prestigious Prix de Rome Visual Arts 2025. The shortlist for this incentive prize for talented visual artists was announced by the Mondriaan Fund at the beginning of May.

Buhlebezwe Siwani Photo Amsterdam Museum Daphne Lucker

Buhlebezwe Siwani Ngomso 2025 Photo Amsterdam Museum Gert Jan van Rooij
Patricia Werneck Ribas (1972, Brazil)
Patricia Werneck Ribas (1972) investigates how identities are formed and the role played in this by gender, cultural background, nationality, and history. Her new video work, Schipper mag ik overvaren, takes its audience into the dreamlike in-between world of four young women on the cusp of adulthood. They are young and carefree. Yet they are simultaneously stuck in social norms and existing power relations. Is it possible to break free from oppressive systems and “sail across” to another, more liberated future?

Patricia Werneck Ribas Photo Amsterdam Museum Daphne Lucker

Patricia Werneck Ribas Schipper, may I cross over 2025 Photo Amsterdam Museum Gert Jan van Rooij
Don Yaw Kwaning (1990, Netherlands) and Maurits de Bruijn (1984, Netherlands)
A barrier, typically of wire, enclosing an area to prevent or control access or escape is the title of the new work by artist Don Yaw Kwaning and writer Maurits de Bruijn. Visitors will see an installation made of deformed steel cables that are intertwined into a kind of fence. They will hear spoken words about the political relations between Israel and Palestine, about connection and fragmentation, and about the role fences play in this.

Don Yaw Kwaning Photo Amsterdam Museum Daphne Lucker

Don Yaw Kwaning and Maurits de Bruijn in Refresh Amsterdam #3 Photo Amsterdam Museum Gert Jan van Rooij