An exhibition about the future opens at the Amsterdam Museum on Friday 11 July 2025: Refresh Amsterdam #3: Imagine the Future. In the year that Amsterdam celebrates its 750th anniversary, the Amsterdam Museum looks ahead. In the third edition of Refresh Amsterdam, artists and the general public look ahead and share their dreams, hopes and wishes for the future. Refresh Amsterdam #3 consists of three parts: an exhibition with work by 15 mostly emerging artists, a solo exhibition by Raquel van Haver and a section where the public shares its vision of the future.
15 Amsterdam artists
"Anno 2025, society faces major issues such as climate change, social inequality and power shifts on a global scale. This calls for new vistas." says Nina Folkersma, guest curator of Refresh Amsterdam #3. According to her, artists are the antennae of society and experts in imagining new visions. The Amsterdam Museum commissioned fifteen contemporary artists (collectives) who have a relationship with the city to create new work. From different creative disciplines, they give their personal views on the future. They encourage visitors not to see the future as a fixed fact, but as one of many possible scenarios in which you yourself have a role.
The exhibition features works by visual artists, designers, filmmakers, photographers, writers, dancers and performers. Some artists' work explores a utopian world centred on a sense of community and connection with nature. Others call attention to the past: after all, you have to understand where you came from before you can know where you want to go. There are makers who focus on the apocalyptic aspects of the future. And makers for whom precisely hope and optimism are most important when thinking about the future. In alphabetical order:
Frank Ammerlaan (1979, Netherlands)
For his new works for Refresh Amsterdam #3 Frank Ammerlaan was inspired by Samantha Harvey's book Orbital: a poetic and philosophical story about planet Earth from the point of view of six astronauts in an orbiting space station. He presents patchwork paintings made from pieces of cotton and linen sewn together. Some pieces have been wet in the open air or soiled with dust particles and soil. Other pieces incorporate meteorite particles. The fabrics appear faded by sunlight, suggesting the passage of time. His work is about 'the bigger picture': the realisation that everything is always changing and in motion.
Sebastián Díaz Morales (1975, Argentina)
Since 2018, artist Sebastián Díaz Morales has been filming Amsterdam's streets every first Monday of the month at noon. Calm street scenes mingle with the loud, screaming sound of the air alarm, which warned of bombs in World War II. Today, wars still rage in other countries, but when the siren goes off in Amsterdam, life goes on unchanged. By the end of 2025, the air alarm is likely to be abolished in its current form. Díaz Morales' work is thus a final salute to an alarm that no longer sounds an alarm.
In addition, Díaz Morales shows the work One Eye Melting, a video projection of a spinning eye. The pupil reflects disasters (wars, natural disasters, accidents) and moments of renewal (growing micro-organisms, the expanding cosmos, new technologies). The video work shows how destruction and rebirth are deeply connected. Collapse is not only an end, but also an opportunity to reimagine our future.
Ivna Esajas (year and place of birth not stated)
Ivna Esajas' works are somewhere between drawings and paintings. They are representations of people, applied in elegant lines and almost translucent colours. The figures form a unity, intimately entwined, so you don't know which face, arm or leg belongs to which body. The individual here is always a we. Esajas' works arise from intuition and are inspired by poetry, literature, myths and everyday life. In her work, she makes connections between past and present, between stories and wandering memories. In May 2025, Esajas won the thirteenth edition of the ABN AMRO Art Prize.
Koen Hauser (1972, Netherlands)
Koen Hauser works magic with photographic images. He is inspired by the richly decorated buildings of Amsterdam's city centre. In particular, buildings in the Amsterdam School style. Hauser transforms photographic images into architectural elements and decorations. These decorations are in turn based on medical photography. In this way, he transforms the original associations with pain, illness, loss and trauma into a healing experience of beauty and comfort.
Ischa Kempka (1995, Netherlands)
Ischa Kempka's work is inspired by an archive of images and texts, often related to feminism, mythology and archaeology. Her new work He was right about nothing (2025) consists of a gateway of stacked ceramic vases full of symbolic signs. The signs are derived from medieval symbolism or they refer to more recent history, for instance to Amsterdam feminist Wilhelmina Drucker and the Dolle Mina's. With the work, Kempka invites visitors to look at the past and work from there on changes we want to see in the future.
Minne Kersten (1993, Netherlands)
Minne Kersten's video work The Same Room, 2023 shows an abandoned, cluttered bedroom that becomes increasingly flooded. The flooded room evokes thoughts of disasters and the destructive power of water. But also of a sense of calm after the storm. The work invites us to think about the end as a transitional moment rather than something definitive.
Natascha Libbert (1973, Netherlands)
Natascha Libbert's photographs often show the destructive power of nature and humans. Her photographs show the diverse ways we interact with the earth. In Refresh Amsterdam #3 among other things, Libbert presents a large-format photograph of a fragment of a Boeing 747. Once called the Queen of the skies, this giant plane is today relegated to the aircraft graveyard and reduced to scrap material. Libbert focuses on moments of destruction, but always with an eye on the possibility of recovery.
Brigitte Louter (1996, Netherlands)
Brigitte Louter makes installations, sculpture and drawings. She is interested in man's constant attempts to structure, measure and map a world that often does not resonate with a desire for order and simplicity. In the exhibition, she works from an average filing cabinet. Behind the cabinet is a thought model in which drawings of hard-to-measure events and experiences in the city can be seen; a kind of subjective maps of Amsterdam, forming a system all its own and open-ended. Louter sees the installation as a peculiar data set that she offers to reflect on the future of everyday use, classification and archiving of data.
Fiona Lutjenhuis (1991, Netherlands)
Fiona Lutjenhuis creates two new drawings for the Refresh Amsterdam #3. The diptych, executed in warm pastel tones, depicts a fictional, mystical world in which the earthly and the supernatural intermingle. The drawings show a fantasy landscape filled with mushrooms, as a reference to decay and mortality, and eggs, as a symbol of birth and new life. Together, the drawings form a story about the destruction of life and being born again after death. Lutjenhuis has been nominated for the prestigious Prix de Rome Visual Arts 2025. Two of the four nominated artists will participate in Refresh Amsterdam #3: Imagine the Future at the Amsterdam Museum.
Roshanak & Afagh Morrowatian (1989 & 1984, Iran)
Iranian-born Roshanak Morrowatian works as a dancer, choreographer and performer. Together with her sister Afagh Morrowatian, visual artist/photographer, she is making a video for Refresh Amsterdam #3 titled Protagonist (2025). In the video, a woman moves through the rooms and corridors of Huis Willet-Holthuysen. The woman's body appears to be a decorative part of the stately canal house, but slowly transforms from accessory to protagonist, to protagonist in her own life. Afagh and Roshanak Morrowatian explore what it means to be a body in diaspora. The video shows breaking old patterns and claiming a place of her own.
Buhlebezwe Siwani (1987, South Africa)
Buhlebezwe Siwani is an initiated sangoma (spiritual healer) and a multidisciplinary artist whose work focuses on the black female body and African spirituality. Siwani has lived in Cape Town and Amsterdam for four years. For Refresh Amsterdam #3: Imagine the Future, Siwani, together with a group of children (6-11 years old) from all districts of Amsterdam, is making four large drawings in which the perspective of children is central. How do these children envision the future? Siwani has been nominated for the prestigious Prix de Rome Visual Arts 2025. The shortlist for the incentive prize for talented visual artists was announced by the Mondriaan Fund in early May.
Patricia Werneck Ribas (1972, Brazil)
Patricia Werneck Ribas (b. 1972) explores how identity is created and what role gender, cultural background, nationality and history play in it. Her new video work Skipper May I Sail Over takes visitors into the dreamlike in-between world of four young women on the border between childhood and adulthood. They are young and playful. At the same time, they are stuck in social patterns and existing power relations. Is it possible to break free from oppressive patterns and 'sail across' to a different, more liberated future?
Don Yaw Kwaning (1990, Netherlands) and Maurits de Bruijn (1984, Netherlands)
A barrier, typically of wire, enclosing an area to prevent or control access or escape is the title of the new work by artist Don Yaw Kwaning and writer Maurits de Bruijn. Visitors see an installation made of deformed steel cables woven into a kind of fence. Along with it, they hear a spoken text about the political relationship between Israel and Palestine, about connection and fragmentation and the role fences play in it.
4Siblings Collective (founded 2018)
4Siblings is a queer-eco-feminist art and research collective. Especially for Refresh Amsterdam #3 4Siblings researched Amsterdam's possible future heirloom seeds (seeds of plants passed down from generation to generation). They spoke to befriended artists, farmers and gardeners and asked them to share short stories about their favourite seeds. These stories are presented through a colourful collection of showy beans, soldier beans and maize seeds. Together, the stories and images form a science-fiction story about the future use of Amsterdam's heirloom seeds.
Solo exhibition Raquel van Haver: The Collateral Kin
Three years ago, as part of the 750th anniversary of the city of Amsterdam, the Amsterdam Museum asked visual artist Raquel van Haver (1989, Colombia) and her studio to create new works for and about the city. The series consists of six large group portraits portraying 120 different Amsterdammers. The six installations will be presented separately in the main hall of the exhibition Refresh Amsterdam #3: Imagine the Future.
"I was inspired by 17th-century group portraits from the Amsterdam Museum's collection. Paintings known to visitors as works in which the elite often came together and showed their deeds with greatest gestures. I draw these works into the present with The Collateral Kin," Van Haver said. Van Haver's portraits show people who Van Haver believes should be remembered in the future because they contribute to the city of Amsterdam. Van Haver portrays well-known and lesser-known social players, aged between 20 and 95, who have been active in a variety of fields over the past 60 years. From education, climate, housing and culture to social cohesion in the city. Her group portraits depict, for example, Hussein Suleiman (co-founder of Daily Paper), Chander Peroti a.k.a. Kiddo Cee (teacher and rapper from Southeast), Joost van Bellen (DJ) and Regina Mac-Nack (founder of the Hoop van Morgen food bank foundation). Van Haver not only painted the people on canvas but also photographed them and archived everyone's story in cooperation with the City Archive.
"By interweaving and bundling the stories of the people of Amsterdam in this very way with its setting the museum, art historical and historic gives the stories more power in today's time. And can we mirror and take in our contemporary society precisely because of this," Van Haver said. "This work is not only a celebration of and for the city but also a critical look at the handling forms in the city and developments in its policies. It is 120 different voices, all dealing in his, her or them way with the city, politics and its perils and dreams, showing a clear picture as the mirror they hold up to their policies and administrators."
With old veneer and painting techniques, van Haver bridges the present, past and future in which she uses contemporary technology and innovative techniques to take a big step into the future, with a nod to the history of painting in the Netherlands. As a contemporary artist, she wants to use her art and the connecting factor in this project to give all these 120 faces and voices a place in the history is of Amsterdam. "People who make our city , the city. Heroic, Determined and Merciful."
Studio Raquel van Haver consists of the following people: Raquel van Haver, Tim van Vliet, Anna Gawęcka, Jazmon Voss, Alex Fischer, Victor Mari de Herder, Frank Hietbrink, Angel-Rose Oedit Doebé, Marian Genet and Kim Kleuskens.
Public area and education
A new addition to previous editions, this time the general public has also been invited to participate in the exhibition. In the third part of the exhibition, visitors will see 20 works submitted from all over the Netherlands following a call by Robert ten Brink and subsequently selected. The future wishes are expressed in various disciplines. For example, visitors will see a rainbow pig, a protest sign, a portal of spiritual mushrooms and a mixtape. The Amsterdam Museum also travelled all over the country to collect future wishes, resulting in over 150 recorded wishes on video.
The future wishes and perspectives of children and students are also given a place in the exhibition. In collaborations with the IMC Weekend School, Mediacollege Amsterdam and MBO College Zuid, Amsterdam students created artworks and interactive installations.
Imara Limon, chief curator Amsterdam Museum: "With this XL edition of Refresh Amsterdam, the Amsterdam Museum presents 16 artists with new work, 20 creative reflections submitted from all over the Netherlands as well as artworks by young people about the future. In this way, we want to give an insight into the many ideas and feelings there are about the future."
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