Amsterdam Museum looks to the future of the city in festive year

Exhibition Refresh Amsterdam #3: Imagine the Future from 11-07 to 30-11-2025

An exhibition about the future opens at the Amsterdam Museum on Friday 11 July 2025: Refresh Amsterdam #3: Imagine the Future. For the third edition of the biennial Refresh Amsterdam exhibition, this time not only artists are contributing but the general public will also have the chance to share a vision of the future and be part of the exhibition.

"We are celebrating Amsterdam's 750th anniversary but at the same time thinking about the future. Therefore, we invite artists and the general public to look ahead and share with us their dreams, hopes and wishes regarding the future," says Imara Limon, chief curator of the Amsterdam Museum.

Artworks

The Amsterdam Museum has commissioned 15 professional contemporary artists to create work on urgent themes affecting our common future. How do they see our future? How can art and creativity help us explore new possibilities? What can they mean for us and the world around us? The exhibition features works by visual artists, designers, filmmakers, photographers, writers and performers. These include artwork made from children's future drawings, speculation about a more inclusive future based on fictional archaeological finds, and research on future seeds and plants for Amsterdam. Each artwork is thus a call to see the future not as an inevitability, but as one of many possible, alternative futures that we can actively shape - through imagination, creativity and collaboration.

Raquel van Haver

Visual artist Raquel van Haver (b. 1989, Colombia) created as part of Amsterdam 750 under the project name Group portraits of the 21st century, six new works for the Amsterdam Museum. These six large group portraits are presented separately in the main hall of the exhibition Refresh Amsterdam #3: Imagine the Future. The works by Van Haver, who also made a group portrait for the first edition of Refresh Amsterdam in 2020, show people who Van Haver believes should be remembered in the future because they are contributing to the city of Amsterdam now. She drew inspiration from 17th- and 18th-century regent portraits and other group portraits by Dutch masters, including from the collections of the Amsterdam Museum and Rijksmuseum. Van Haver portrayed well-known and lesser-known social players who have been active over the past 60 years in a variety of fields, from education to housing and social cohesion in the city. Her group portraits depict, for example, professor of anthropology Gloria Wekker, writer and rapper Massih Hutak, poet and performer Diana Ozon and DJ Joost van Bellen. Each painting is framed with special veneers incorporating further stories.

Grand public contest

In addition to professional artists, the general public will also be asked to submit their own vision of the future. The Amsterdam Museum is going on tour throughout the Netherlands to ask the Dutch public to share their dreams, expectations and wishes regarding the future. That future wish can take any form: a video, a postcard, a song, a poem, a painting, a construction drawing or a photograph. Anything goes, as long as it shows a personal view of the future of the Netherlands. All entries will become part of the Amsterdam Museum's digital collection. A professional jury will select the 20 most inspiring entries. The winning entries, as well as the works of the professional artists, will be displayed in the exhibition Refresh Amsterdam #3: Imagine the Future to be seen.

Closing Panorama Amsterdam

Refresh Amsterdam #3: Imagine the Future will occupy the entire wing of the Amsterdam Museum on the Amstel. Some 1,100 square metres. From Monday 2 June 2025, the permanent collection presentation will therefore close Panorama Amsterdam: a living history of the city and the temporary exhibitions currently on view (Women of Amsterdam - an ode and Collecting the City #5: (T)houseless in the city). In other locations, the museum continues its temporary programming, while preparations for the renovation of the Civic Orphanage are in full swing.

About Refresh Amsterdam

Refresh Amsterdam #3: Imagine the Future is the third edition of Refresh Amsterdam. Refresh Amsterdam is a large-scale art event organised by the Amsterdam Museum together with various partners every two years. With a public programme and exhibition featuring work from various creative disciplines, the museum raises topical themes that are currently alive in the city and society, and gives a stage to artists from different perspectives and disciplines.

The first edition of Refresh Amsterdam took place in 2020 and covered Sense of Place. Twenty-five artists reflected on today's city with work. They charted changes and told extraordinary stories about little-exposed sides of the city. The chosen projects were about Amsterdam, but also showed that the experiences of people with all kinds of backgrounds, networks and traditions often transcend city and national borders.

The second edition of Refresh Amsterdam opened in 2023 and dealt with the impact of war and conflict in the world on the city. The city as we know it today was shaped by people from all over the world, who not infrequently fled war and oppression. Twenty contemporary artists gave their perspective on the theme. In honour of the Amsterdam 750 celebrations, the Friends Lottery is contributing from the Special Cultural Projects, making this third edition of Refresh Amsterdam extra large and involving the whole of the Netherlands in the exhibition.

Refresh Amsterdam #3: Imagine the Future is on display from 11 July to 30 November 2025 at the Amsterdam Museum aan de Amstel (Amstel 51, H'ART Museum building). The exhibition is made possible in part by the Friends Lottery. The Amsterdam Museum is structurally supported by Main Beneficiary Municipality of Amsterdam and Main Partner Education ELIA Foundation.

Last exhibition at Amstel 51

Refresh Amsterdam #3: Imagine the Future is the Amsterdam Museum's last exhibition in the H'ART Museum building. The Amsterdam Museum showed group portraits from the Amsterdam Collection there since 2014 and established its temporary main location there from 2022. From 1 January 2026, the lease will expire and the Amsterdam Museum will start programming at various other locations in Amsterdam while the museum continues to prepare for the renovation and refurbishment of the Burgerweeshuis. This decision is in line with the Amsterdam Museum's mission as a network museum to create programmes together with organisations and groups in the city. The reopening of the renovated main location on Kalverstraat is scheduled for 2028.

Judikje Kiers: "Our presentation on the Amstel is a testing ground for our new museum. We tested out different collaborations, and ways of telling stories, presenting and programming there in recent years. Until the reopening of our renovated main location on Kalverstraat in 2028, we will go even deeper into the city and at the same time focus on the renovation and refurbishment of the Burgerweeshuis. In this way, we will continue to develop as a museum in the run-up to the new Amsterdam Museum."

Among others, the Amsterdam Museum will programme in De Hallen, in various locations of the OBA and is working with partners on a presentation at the Westergasterrein. Objects from the Amsterdam Museum's collection will remain visible at home and abroad.

Valuable cooperation

The Amsterdam Museum has had a presence in the monumental museum building on the Amstel since 2014, first with the exhibition Group portraits of the 17th century, and from 2022 with the collection presentation Panorama Amsterdam and no fewer than 15 temporary exhibitions on a wide variety of Amsterdam themes. From the plane crash in the Bijlmer, the gentrification of Amsterdam North, Amsterdam's colonialism, war and conflict, club Roxy, power women, 400 years of shared history with New York and benefactor Piet van Eeghen to homelessness in Amsterdam. The museum also developed a rich educational programme there in cooperation with the ELJA Foundation and for and with MBO students, and from 2022 to the end of 2025, the museum programme there an estimated 250 events for the public. Between 2022 and the end of 2025, the Amsterdam Museum on the Amstel received an estimated more than 400,000 visitors, including almost 30,000 students and 1,300 classes.

For over a decade, the Amsterdam Museum and H'ART Museum have enjoyed a beautiful and valuable collaboration on the river Amstel, with the presentations of both organisations complementing each other well for a wide audience of art and heritage lovers from home and abroad. Together with Museum van de Geest, the institutions form a unique museum building. In 2025, the entire building will be dedicated to Amsterdam's birthday with a rich palette of exhibitions.