Temporary exhibition: OF COURSE STUDYING ART IS A TERRIBLE IDEA

Danae Tapia (1986) is a multimedia artist born into the Chilean working class and based in Rotterdam since 2016. She attended the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten from 2022-2024.

She is self-taught as an artist; her academic training is in other fields. She holds a BA in Social Communication from Universidad de Chile, an MSc in Management from the University of Bristol and a Research Master in Comparative Literary Studies from Utrecht University. She is currently a doctoral candidate in Philosophy, Art and Critical Thought at the European Graduate School.

In 2018 she founded the Digital Witchcraft Institute, an artistic research initiative that collects and presents non-conforming approaches to technology. Since then it has carried out several international projects on posthuman technology. Alongside her artistic practice, Tapia has a long trajectory in the public interest technology sector.

She has presented her work at Kodaiji Temple in Kyoto, Casa de las Américas in Havana, the Garage Museum in Moscow, RightsCon in San Francisco and Taipei, MozFest in London, Hackers on Planet Earth in New York and JSConf in Honolulu, among others. Her writing has appeared in magazines, academic journals and creative non-fiction outlets.

Tapia is a former Mozilla Fellow and has received numerous scholarships and awards. She teaches at the Willem de Kooning Academy in Rotterdam.

Hannah Dawn Henderson (1991, UK) is an artist and writer based in The Hague. She previously trained in graphic design, and later graduated from the Royal Academy of Arts (KABK) in 2014 in the faculty of Artistic Research. She attended the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten from 2020-2022.

Henderson’s art practice encompasses diverse forms: films, installations, texts, and printed matter, as well as participatory events such as workshops. Centrally, Henderson understands her practice as a lyrical investigation into broadly sociological dynamics surrounding identity, communication and memory. Over the last years, many of her projects have focused on the concept of the archive and questions around memory. This extends from her earlier artworks, which often contemplated the task of translation and (the loss or abstraction of) language. What bridges these themes are two sustaining core questions: what is within one’s reach of articulation, and how do we make sense of that which we do not have the words to talk about? 

These questions lead Henderson to examine the fragility of collective memory, the significance of absence or ambiguity, and alternative modes of preserving heritage — such as by way of ritual and story-telling. In these explorations, she often draws inspiration from her own creolised, diasporic background.

Henderson has exhibited and participated in projects nationally and internationally, such as at the Rotterdam Kunsthal (NL), Queer Arts Festival Antwerp (BE), Ambika P3 (UK), Haus N Athens (GR), and the Experiments in Cinema Festival (USA), amongst others. 

She has been published by Book Works (UK), and Netherlands-based organisations such as Volume Magazine, Koninklijke Boom with the Royal Netherlands Institute of Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies, ArtEZ University of Arts, PrintRoom and the Nieuwe Instituut. Within the framework of her research practice, Henderson has undertaken projects at the Wilberforce Institute for Study of Slavery and Emancipation with the Hull History Centre (UK) and the Nieuwe Instituut (NL).

Thato Toeba (Maseru, Lesotho, 1990) is an artist, lawyer and social sciences researcher working with mixed-media photomontage and assemblage. In 2025, they completed a two-year residency at the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam, and in September 2026 they began a residency at Gasworks, London. They make collage objects and installations using historical archives and architectural space as materials to think through questions of power; the shadow of the empire and its continuing cast into the collective spirit of the global south. They studied Law at the National University of Lesotho, Humboldt University and the University of the Western Cape.

Anyone Can Be Lucifer, their first institutional exhibition took place at the 57th Recontres d’Arles, France (2026) and is followed by I beat you because I love you at the Johannesburg Art Gallery (2026). Other solo shows include sehlahla se tukang empa se sa che at Stevenson, Cape Town (2025) and Phate lia Lekana, Stevenson, Johannesburg (2023). 

Notable group exhibitions include What Knots Knot Knots, Noorderlicht, Leeuwarden, the Netherlands (2026); Layered Realities: Photography & Collage, Fotomuseum Hilversum (2026); I Still Dream of Lost Vocabularies at Autograph, London (October 2025) and Manifestation #52: To Be Determined, Buro Stedelijk, Amsterdam (August 2025); Tools for Conviviality, Kunstinstituut Melly, Rotterdam (2024); Today I wish to talk to your dreams, Mount Nelson, Cape Town (2023); Where do I begin, Stevenson, Cape Town (2022); and Propelling Otherness, Morija Museum, Maseru (2021).

Toeba was awarded the 2025 FNB Art Prize.