Erwin Olaf is an internationally exhibiting artist whose diverse practice centers around society’s marginalized individuals, including people of color, and the LGBTQ+ community. In 2019 Olaf became a Knight of the Order of the Lion of the Netherlands after 500 works from his oeuvre were added to the collection of the Rijksmuseum. Taco Dibbits, Rijksmuseum director, called Olaf “one of the most important photographers of the final quarter of the 20th century”.

In 2018, Olaf completed a triptych of monumental photographic and filmic tableaux portraying periods of seismic change in major world cities, and the citizens embraced and othered by their urban progress. Like much of his work, it is contextualized by complex race relations, the devastation of economic divisions, and the complications of sexuality. Olaf has maintained an activistic approach to equality throughout his 40-year career after starting out documenting pre-AIDS gay liberation in Amsterdam’s nightlife in the 1980s.

A bold and sometimes controversial approach has earned the artist a number of prestigious collaborations, from Vogue and Louis Vuitton, to the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam. He served as the official portrait artist for the Dutch royal family in 2017, and designed the national side of the euro coins for King Willem-Alexander in 2013. He has been awarded the Netherlands’ prestigious Johannes Vermeer Award, as well as Photographer of the Year at the International Color Awards, and Kunstbeeld magazine’s Dutch Artist of the Year.

Erwin Olaf has exhibited worldwide, including Centro de Arte Contemporáneo de Málaga, Málaga, Spain; Museu da Imagem e do Som, São Paulo, Brazil; Martin-Gropius-Bau, Berlin, Germany; Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art, Winston-Salem, North Carolina, USA; and Museo de Arte Contemporáneo, Santiago, Chile. In the spring of 2019, Olaf’s work was the subject of a double exhibition at Kunstmuseum The Hague and The Hague Museum of Photography, as well as a solo exhibition at the Shanghai Center of Photography. In 2021, Erwin Olaf had his first solo exhibition Im Wald at Galerie Ron Mandos and mounted a large survey exhibition at Kunsthalle München, Germany.

Olaf’s work is included in numerous private and public collections, such as the Rijksmuseum and Stedelijk Museum, both in Amsterdam, The Netherlands; Fonds National d’Art Contemporain, Paris, France; Museum Ludwig, Cologne, Germany; Museum Voorlinden, Wassenaar, The Netherlands, North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh, United States; Art Progressive Collection, United States, and the Pushkin Museum, Moscow, Russia.

Erwin Olaf was born in 1959 in Hilversum, The Netherlands
He lives and works in Amsterdam, The Netherlands

Visit the artist’s website here.

Born in 1986 in Soweto, South Africa
Lives and works between Johannesburg and Cape Town.

Material, metaphor and the black body are the tools that Mohau Modisakeng uses to explore the influence of South Africa’s violent history that has been ignored in today’s society, on how we understand our cultural, political, and social roles as human beings in post-colonial Africa and in particular post-apartheid South Africa. Represented through film, large-scale photographic prints, installations and performances, his “work doesn’t start off with an attempt to portray violence but it becomes mesmerising because although we might recognise history as our past, the body is indifferent to social changes, so it remembers.”

Born in Soweto, an epicentre of black urbanity and cosmopolitan culture, the multi-award winning Mohau Modisakeng is a product of Cape Town’s Michaelis School of Fine Art. Mentored by Jane Alexander and predominantly working and training in sculpture, he completed his undergraduate degree in 2009 then completed his Masters degree at the same institution. He was awarded the SASOL New Signatures Award for 2011 and has exhibited at Armory Show, New York (2016); Saatchi Gallery, London (2012); Dak’Art Biennale, Dakar (2012); Focus 11 and Basel (2011). In 2013 Modisakeng produced an ambitious new video work in association with Samsung as a special project for the 2013 FNB Joburg Art Fair. His work is included in public collections such as the Johannesburg Art Gallery, IZIKO South African National Gallery, Cape Town and SAATCHI Gallery, London as well as significant private collections such as Zeitz MOCAA.

Born in 1991 in Willemstad, Curaçao
Lives and works in Amsterdam, The Netherlands

Gilleam Trapenberg (1991, Willemstad, Curaçao) moved to the Netherlands at the age of nineteen and graduated from the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague in 2017. He participated in multiple group exhibitions, such as In The Presence of Absence at the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam (2020). In 2017 he published his first photo book Big Papi and in 2018 he was one of the nominees for the Foam Paul Huf Award. He’s the fourth recipient of the Florentine Riem Vis grant (2020). His first solo exhibition at Foam, Amsterdam opened in 2021. Gilleam Trapenberg lives and works in Amsterdam.

Through his work, Trapenberg reflects on the contradictions that are part of the social landscape in Curaçao, were the idea of a utopian paradise is diametrically opposed to the realities of post-colonialism and tourism. He explores stereotypes and tropes that have manifested themselves through social culture and the Western media.

Born 1997 in Terneuzen, The Netherlands
Lives and works in Rotterdam, NL

Sander Coers is a Rotterdam-based artist working with photography. Recreating and rearranging memories, he reflects on his own stories as well as those of his friends and peers, often other young men. Through a tender gaze, he seeks to visualise and establish new perceptions of masculinity within melancholic, romantic and dreamlike worlds, comprising elements from nostalgic echoes of his youth.

Kwadwo Amfo was born in 1990, in Ghana
He lives and works in Amsterdam

Kwadwo Amfo established an early interest in art making while growing up which led him to be enrolled into the Visual Arts department in secondary school and did his elective courses in Textiles, Graphic Design, General Knowledge in Art and English Literature. While in secondary school, Amfo developed his love for textile and graphic design while re-enforcing his interest in photography/filmmaking and realised that the two can go hand in hand as he pursued photography (Fiction) at the Royal Academy of Art, The Hague.

Social commentary became the base of Amfo’s work throughout the years ranging from societal beauty standards, identity politics, social inclusion and conformity, and topics on the self and the other. Amfo has expanded this into works that speak representations of misrepresentations, stereotypes and struggles of people of colour. Amfo’s decision to almost exclusively depict black characters, individuals of African heritage, reflects his desire, born of his own experiences, to bring to the fore the inadequate and troubling representations of black people in today’s media, as well as throughout history. In this way their blackness is both a reminder of his search for truth and a microcosm of how the societies in which we live construct the value systems that affect us all.

Use of video media in the virtual space and augmented reality is a new feature in Amfo’s ever expanding creative process. Amfo has broadly exhibited his work at the Scotia Bank Contact Photo Festival in Toronto, in Netherlands and Ghana.

Marcin Dudek was born in 1979, in Poland
He lives and works in Brussels

Marcin Dudek is an artist whose objects, installations, collages, and performances touch upon questions regarding the role of control in society, the hierarchy of power, and mechanisms that govern the release of violence and aggression. His use of abstraction to deal with these questions further highlights the effort, anxiety and compulsion that characterize his process of image production.

Dudek’s artistic practice is focused on situations that are based on the confrontation between the world of violence and the world of art. To construct these situations, he often invokes the history of extreme events that have taken place in stadium spaces, paired with events of his own experience as a teenage football fan. Dudek analyzes the abstract concept of aggression, triggered frequently and often without premeditation, within the architecture of any given spectacle.

After leaving Poland aged 21, he studied at the University Mozarteum, Salzburg and at Central Saint Martins, London, graduating in 2005 and 2007 respectively. His work has been exhibited internationally at institutions including the Moscow Museum of Modern Art, Salzburger Kunstverein (AT), the Arad Art Museum (RO), Bunkier Sztuki Gallery in Krakow (PL), the Goethe-Institut Ukraine, and The Warehouse Dallas (US). His installation “The Cathedral of Human Labor” (2013) is on permanent view at the Verbeke Foundation in Belgium. In 2018, he presented a large installation at Manifesta 12 Palermo, which was followed by a solo exhibition at the Wrocław Contemporary Museum.