RM Sunday Session: Gilleam Trapenberg & Britte Sloothaak in Conversation
We are happy to invite you to our RM Sunday Session: Gilleam Trapenberg and Britte Sloothaak in conversation. On the final day of Trapenberg’s exhibition Currents, the artist will talk with art historian, and curator Britte Sloothaak about his new series of works showcased at the gallery.
To attend this event, please RSVP via the button below. For those who won’t be able to make it to the gallery on this day, we will also livestream the RM Sunday Session via Instagram.
Practical information:
RM Sunday Session: Gilleam Trapenberg and Britte Sloothaak in conversation
Date: Sunday, 29 October
Time: 2:00 – 3:00 PM
Language: English
Location: Galerie Ron Mandos, Prinsengracht 282, Amsterdam
About Britte Sloothaak
Britte Sloothaak (1984) is an art historian, curator, and doctoral researcher affiliated with TU/e’s Curatorial Research Collective. In her projects, she explores interdisciplinary perspectives on the construction of knowledge in museums of modern and contemporary art. She developed this interest while doing archival research, writing acquisition proposals, and curating exhibitions while working for the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam between 2011 and 2023, including In the Presence of Absence (co-curated with Fadwa Naamna) for which she worked closely with Gilliam Trapenberg before acquiring his work for the museum collection. Sloothaak is on the Advisory Committee Multi-Year Grants: Heritage of the Amsterdams Fonds voor de Kunst (AFK) and part of the Supervisory Board of the Bonnefantenmuseum in Maastricht.
ABOUT Gilleam Trapenberg
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.
