Requiem for an Exit, 2025 © Kvam Oldereid
A new exhibition and the THEA space in Groningen, Netherlands, use art to think through technology and human experience, explains curator and director Roosje Klap
Last year the Nooderlicht Biennale was themed Machine Entanglements and, including exhibitions by 75 artists across the northern Dutch city of Groningen, explored “how we now live, eat, sleep, dream and even date through technology,” says Roosje Klap, director of Nooderlicht, the platform for photography and lens-based media. The shows in one venue, THEA, focused on extraction – the “ugly monster” which makes technology, as Klap puts it – and, working in the building, she was called to reception one day. “There was this guy, maybe about 55, and he was very emotional because he had seen all this for the first time,” she explains.
“He had known about it, but this was the first time he had really seen it. That was very important for me, very touching, but then he asked, ‘Is there any hope? Because I don’t see any hope, only sadness and terrible feelings’. And that’s when I started to wonder, what’s the way out? There must be a way out, how can we escape, or what’s the antidote?” That insight led to the latest exhibition at THEA, Thinking Hands, which explores how embodied knowledge endures in our ever-more technological age.
Curated by Klap with Musoke Nalwoga, Thinking Hands includes both still and moving work, and finds quirky, thought-provoking twists on the theme. There’s Paul Kooiker’s series Talking Hands, for example, a playful look at body language, and there’s Martina Bacigalupo’s found series Gulu Real Art Studio – a series of studio portraits, in which the heads had been clipped out of the image to make passport photos. Removing the face as a point of focus, Gulu Real Art Studio throws the attention on the sitters’ hands and postures, and what they express.
Andi Gáldi Vinkó’s Sorry I Gave Birth I Disappeared But Now I’m Back explores the deeply embodied experience of early motherhood, a time in which the baby is technically separate but is often ‘joined at the hip’; Martha Rosler’s Semiotics of the Kitchen, from the generation before Gáldi Vinkó, rethinks cookery skills as enforced, internalised physical socialisation. Laure Prouvost’s Taking Care (Love letter to a fellow art work) depicts the artist as art handler, talking to a viewer as if he or she is a painting or object; Requiem for an Exit by Kvam/Oldereid shows an eerie armless robot, whose disembodied projected face and AI-generated voice speak of genocide and human displacement.
“All the thinking that is somehow stored within the body, all the knowledge that isn’t necessarily in the head, that’s what makes us human.” Roosje Klap
Klap takes me on a virtual tour, walking me through the space via her laptop; we’re 300 miles apart but she’s warm and funny, cracking jokes through cyberspace. “All the thinking that is somehow stored within the body, all the knowledge that isn’t necessarily in the head, that’s what makes us human,” she smiles, turning the laptop back to herself and reflecting on how instinctively we now use technology. And photography, of course, is part of that process.
“The apparatus is part of the body, and the decision to make that photo – yes or no – is also an embodied decision,” Klap muses. “I think it is really a mind/body-correlative decision, and I feel that’s very much at the basis of what’s at stake now [as technology expands], because we are taking ourselves out of that whole system.”
And her lively engagement with technology is important because, as well as being director of Nooderlicht, Klap is now Cultural Development Lead at Niemeyer. The Niemeyer is a former tobacco factory now being developed into a public culture and tech hub and THEA has some 8000 square metres of space in it, spread over three floors; THEA is backed by the Mondriaan Fund and support from the City of Groningen, and its mission is to explore the impact of technology via art and culture. The project is a two-year startup so far but, says Klap, she’s “here to stay”, and she is co-developing THEA with Rosa Wevers, an independent curator and senior researcher in Art & Technology at Hanze University.
THEA is also developing alongside the other initiatives at the Niemeyer, which include projects such as the AI Factory; part of an EU-backed network of projects using AI to help research healthcare and agriculture, the AI Factory aims to rethink the technology with privacy, security, and digital sovereignty in mind. “The AI Factories are being put into place as alternatives to big tech, so they are interesting and important,” says Klap. “But that’s where THEA is important too.
“That work is all happening in computers; we can help make it more visible. We can also be a critical little sister to Big Brother and the tech bros. THEA and the tech companies [which are moving into Niemeyer] are an integral part of each other.”
In fact THEA is named after a rebellious female figure; Theodora Niemeyer was the daughter of tobacco company founder Theodorous Niemeyer but, rather than pursuing the bourgeois life into which she was born in 1912, went to the Hague and became a painter. She used her inheritance to create an art fund. “I wanted to honour her, and so the programme is divided into three areas,” says Klap. “It’s a combination of making, doing and talking about art, so there’s art and technology; care and technology, which includes symposia and critical thinking; and make and technology, which for example includes hackerspace.”
THEA will be a key venue for the Noorderlicht Biennale next summer, which will be themed PLAY, and will again be curated by Klap and Nalwoga. The theme suggests latitude to explore computer games and gaming culture, and while Klap is keen to embrace these forms she’s also thinking less literally. She wants to include Debi Cornwall’s Necessary Fictions / Model Citizens, for example, which explore Hollywood film tropes and their impact on people’s perceptions, the stereotypes which inform our reactions without us being consciously aware of them.
As before the biennale will be spread over six or seven locations across Groningen, both the city and the wider province; Klap was born in Amsterdam and studied in the Gerrit Rietveld Academie, but moved to Groningen a decade ago and says it’s a traditionally radical city. “Groningen is known as the red heart of the Netherlands,” says Klap, who I interviewed shortly before far right clashes in The Hague. “Something I find really great here is that I don’t have to explain to politicians that culture is important for society.”
Thinking Hands is on show at THEA, Groningen until 01 November noorderlicht.com/en/whats-on/thinking-hands