%20(1).jpg)
Rising Lai
Rising Lai is a designer/artist based in Rotterdam and The Hague. Originally from Taiwan, Rising is
fascinated with the craftsmanship and beauty in Taiwanese tradition, yet was struggling in life due to their
gender expression. In Rising’s work, they embrace the frictions between their identity as a queer in society,
building upon the possibilities of co-existence to challenge the normative definition of gender. Queering as
the method, Design as the tool, Rising wishes to reimagine and create a world without discrimination.
Zela Odessa Palmer
Zela Odessa is a 24-year-old Dutch/American woman from Amsterdam. Currently, she is living and working in The Hague, where she graduated from the fine arts, painting department at the Royal Academy of Art (KABK).
She has a fascination with some of the biggest themes in existence, such as nature, time, space, chaos, divinity, and anything bigger than humanity and out of our control.
She tries to wrap their mind around these subjects, by organizing those subjects to better understand her surroundings and her place in this world.
By focusing on small details, she gets closer to a bigger picture, every artwork becomes a mental landscape that is a piece to an infinite puzzle. Because her work is usually a direct reaction to her immediate surroundings, her identity plays a big role. Her experience as a queer woman with a biracial background has a strong influence on her work. Even when it is not immediately visible, she strives for equality. This mostly shows itself in the lack of hierarchy in her art, the texts and drawings are of similar sizes, to make the viewer observe without prejudice and choose for themselves how they relate to it.
Kelsey Corby
Kelsey Corby is an American performance artist and painter with a BFA from the Royal Academy of Art (KABK). Their work delineates queerness and effeminacy with authority and power.
As a maker, they aim to satisfy our communities taciturn hunger for exacting revenge. Radical intersectional femme fatale imagery is used to satiate our secretive and shameful desires to see our offenders being offended. In a population where justice for queer & femme persons is fiction, all we are left with is the fantasy of revenge. In a population where forgiveness is godliness and resentment is sin, the constant external requests for our cheek-turning and exoneration is an offense in and of itself, and they object through pictures. Glitter is used as a primary medium because it is never not queer.
Click the black box to see the image.
*content warning*
Lucas M. Franco
Lucas is a Brazilian Graphic Design student, currently in his third year at the Royal Academy of Art (KABK).
When having to write about his practice, he finds it hard to express precisely what it is, as he feels it’s still in development. Undoubtedly though, he has found that sexuality – and everything that orbits it – is central to his work.
It still feels like he is at the beginning of this process, and it’s an introspective one for now; maybe that’s exactly why he wants to put his work out there – even if being vulnerable can prove to be intimidating.
.jpg)
Maddie Swainhart
"For young Maddie, who had so much care to give, but couldn't see any caring characters who looked like them.
You are my muse."
Maddie's practice revolves around research and construction. They research the archetypes of the Mother, the Nuclear Family, and what nurturing looks like while constructing a queered image of those. They wonder what a family could look like outside the binary, considering the question ‘Can we all mother?’
The tension between found footage and performance highlights the gaps between their utopian understanding of motherhood and the Mother figure they saw growing up. Their use of self-portraiture allows them to shift between fantasy and reality and emphasize the expectation of gender roles within domesticity while giving audiences their own playground of The Home.
This is for you and all the queer kids like you, an archive in the making. Giving you more options is the way I nurture.
_JPG.jpg)
Filomena Kolesar
Filomena is a fourth-year fine art student at the Royal Academy of Art (KABK). They like to throw personal narratives into the collective zeitgeist and play with engagement. They don’t believe in a divide between poetry and the everyday.
.jpeg)
Anne-Florence Neveu
Anne-Florence Neveu is an artistic researcher working with digital media, performance and writing. Their projects explore the intersection of eco-surveillance, methods of production and reproduction, and queerness. Their current research project delves into the economy of desire of captive pandas and follows its practices of production/circulation of images, physical regimen and genetic management, as ways of governing the sexual desires of this vulnerable specie
Hemel van Rossum
Hemel Echo van Rossum is a writer and artist based in the Hague who also makes soundscapes. He graduated this year in Literary and Cultural Analysis at the University of Amsterdam with a thesis on the phenomenology of the home in non-coherent narratives. Together with another trans artist he wove six times an hour on a loom at Impakt Festival in 2020 while a soundpiece was playing on changing definitions of nature and love. His poetry on the idea of a second puberty came in second in Babylon’s nteruniversitaire Literaire Prijs in 2022.
Arthur Guilleminot is an ecodeviant artist and positive maverick that practices fertile and generative disobedience. Intersecting disciplines such as design, performance, fashion, and visual art, he creates provocative visuals and vulnerable semantics, casting transilient pleasureful futures for our world. He proposes radically regenerative approaches to meet our present and persistent need for change.
After his art studies at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy, his work is currently researching tools for deconditioning disgust, through “Camp” aestheticism and buffoonery. These tools can be used to explore and harvest the subtleties of disgust to make us kinder in trusting our visceral impulses, disregarding imposed norms of being and keeping an active hope.
Arthur Guilleminot
.jpg)
Ismael Cervantes & Jordi Pros
Ismael Cervantes, born in Argentina and currently studying and working in Spain.
The question, if we are looking at art or if it is the work itself that directs its gaze towards us, has become an ongoing discussion around art, throwing a deep question back about where the boundary lies between the work, the artist, and the viewer.
Can we know something about the artist through his work, can we trust that both the artist's gaze and the viewer's gaze are transparent? Can we communicate through a glance?
In the case of Ismael Cervantes, this limit becomes visible, because, through his work, he undresses before the viewer with the subtlety and delicacy of maintaining a certain distance, of not invading our gaze with his gaze.
Through the realization of an introspective, autobiographical and intimate practice, he offers us the chance to get closer to his reality, which transits those margins that we have not yet integrated or assumed as configuring to our own reality, always biased, always conditioned. Painting, drawing, video, and digital images are just some of the tools that bring us closer to the exploration and identity introspection that the artist carries out, tools to communicate and reveal the limit that distinguishes and equals us, to integrate ourselves within his gaze.
Jordi Pros was born in Spain and he is currently living and working as a freelance photographer and filmmaker in The Netherlands.
He has been living a nomadic life in countries like Andorra, France, Luxembourg and Belgium, capturing and documenting different ways of life and explaining stories with his images. In that way, also he has collaborated in some queer organisations in Spain like Casal Lambda or Sinver.
Currently he is part of the board team at Queer Leiden University. Part of his professional projects are related with documentary and behind the scenes, experimenting as well with digital and analogue. His experience includes comercial images as well creating image content for companies in the education, healthcare, the music industry, human rights and press areas.
