Isaac Julien KBE RA (GB, 1960), a London-born filmmaker and installation artist, is celebrated for his groundbreaking approach to art, seamlessly merging film, dance, photography, music, theater, painting, and sculpture to craft compelling visual narratives through multi-screen film installations. Notably, his 1989 documentary-drama “Looking for Langston” and the Cannes Film Festival Semaine de la Critique prize-winning debut feature, “Young Soul Rebels” (1991), garnered critical acclaim on a global scale.

Julien’s international acclaim extends to prestigious solo exhibitions at prominent venues, including the Barnes Foundation, Smith College Museum of Art, and Bechtler Museum of Modern Art. His works have graced the walls of renowned institutions such as the Museum of Modern Art and the Art Institute of Chicago.

In addition to his artistic pursuits, Julien has made significant contributions to academia, holding key positions at institutions like the University of Arts London and Staatliche Hoscschule fur Gestaltung, Karlsruhe. His educational efforts were further recognized when he was awarded the James Robert Brudner ’83 Memorial Prize and delivered lectures at Yale University in 2016.

Isaac Julien’s dedication to the arts has earned him distinguished accolades, including The Royal Academy of Arts Charles Wollaston Award in 2017 and a knighthood as part of Queen Elizabeth II’s Honours List in 2022. Furthermore, he was honored with the esteemed Kaiserring Goslar Award in 2022.

In April 2023, Tate Britain hosted a comprehensive survey show, presenting Isaac Julien’s illustrious career. This exhibition featured works spanning four decades, encompassing early films and expansive multi-screen installations that delve into the themes of global movement and history. It marked the first-ever presentation of Isaac Julien’s extensive body of work in the United Kingdom.

Erwin Olaf (1959-2023) is known for his diverse practice that centered 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. In 2023, His Majesty the King Willem-Alexander awarded him the Medal of Honor for Art and Science of the Order of the House of Orange.

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.

Visit the artist’s website here.

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

Born and raised in Curaçao, visual artist Gilleam Trapenberg (b. 1991) now lives and works in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. Orbiting his homeland, his creative projects look closely at the fabric of Curaçao’s social landscape, probing at the island’s many paradoxes. He searches beneath the portrayals and tropes of Caribbean life that dominate (Western) media cycles, using the camera to create necessary counter-images.

Occasionally, though, Trapenberg is himself seduced by the allure of the exported picture- postcard; on European shores, nostalgia and longing take hold, perspectives drift, and memories of home are easily romanticised. For the artist, this experience of a perpetual limbo between two distinct places – connected by the fraught legacies of colonialism, enduring flows of goods and people, or even the mass tourism industry – is a growing focal point of his work.

A graduate of The Hague’s Royal Academy of Art, Trapenberg first moved to the Netherlands at 19 years old. In the years since, his works have been exhibited at institutions such as Foam Photography Museum and Stedelik Museum Amsterdam, whilst his first photobook – Big Papi – was published in 2017. He was the 2020 recipient of Foam’s Florentine Riem Vis grant and is one of five shortlisted artists for the Taylor Wessing Photo Portrait Prize 2023. The shortlisted works will soon be exhibited at London’s National Portrait Gallery.

Julian Rosefeldt was born in 1965 in Munich, Germany
He lives and works in Berlin, Germany

Julian Rosefeldt’s work reflects the artist’s fascination with day-to-day reality, and the stereotypes, clichés and mindless repetitions that suffuse popular culture. Since the mid-1990s Rosefeldt has been producing complex film and video installations, as well as photographs, through which we can observe from a cool, detached perspective the formulaic imagery and content that is generated by contemporary media.

The artist has made a name for himself with lavishly produced 16mm and 35mm films. Projected onto several screens to create a panorama-like effect, his films carry the viewer off into a surreal, theatrical world whose inhabitants are caught in the structures and rituals of everyday life. Almost all his works are characterized by their complex interweaving of several dimensions of reality, a device used to expose the production process. Thus, his films are also a homage to the medium of film and a reflection on the construction of fictional narratives, using cinematographic and iconographic means.

Rosefeldt studied architecture in Munich and Barcelona before starting his artistic career with found-footage video installations such as Detonation Deutschland (1996), Asylum (2001-02), Trilogy of Failure (2004–05), The Ship of Fools (2007), American Night (2009), and, more recently, Manifesto (2015). Rosefeldt’s works are in many important museum and private collections all over the world, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the National Gallery, Berlin; and the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney. Since 2011, he holds a professorship for digital and time-based media at the Akademie der Bildenden Künste, Munich.

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.

Born in 1965 in Alphen aan den Rijn, NL
Lives and works in Rotterdam, NL

Geert Mul has been exploring for over 25 years the possibilities of a poetry in the language of new media. This resulted in a flow of experimental artworks in a wide range of media: prints, light-objects, video and interactive/generative computer installations. In Mul’s works, the interrelationship between technology, media and perception is a central theme. Mul’s practice engages the broader public through commissioned artworks in public space.

Geert Mul studied art from 1985 -1990 at the HKA Arnhem where he graduated with computer animations, video and kinetic sculptures. After his studies, he traveled in Mexico, the United States and Asia. He resided for one year in Tokyo. Since 1993 Mul lives and works in Rotterdam, Holland. In the mid-1990s, Mul became one of the first VJ’s, in the alternative Techno scene. These events grew into interactive audio-visual environments, commissioned artworks and installations which were exhibited in a variety of contexts: public space, museums and festivals. Mul has produced over 20 commissioned art installations and exhibited at the Museum Boijmans van Beuningen Rotterdam, Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, The National Museum of Modern Art Kyoto Japan, Museo Nacional Reina Sofia Madrid, Institute Valencia Arte Moderne, Museum of contemporary Art Chicago.

Geert Mul teaches “Unstable Media” at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie (DogTime).