What we carry forward
At Loods6, a former harbour warehouse on KNSM-laan shaped by movement, storage, trade and exchange, the Fine Arts Graduation Show gathers artists whose practices look toward new ways of seeing, relating and making. The building’s history, including its connection to goods such as cacao and to Amsterdam’s wider colonial history and maritime past, reminds us that every site carries traces. Here, those traces become invitations: to listen more carefully, to question what has been inherited, and to imagine what can be transformed.
Cacao seeds carry more than sweetness. They carry histories of soil, labour, distance, violence, care and transformation. They remind us that what is small can hold great complexity, and that what has been stored can also be planted again. In this exhibition, the seed becomes a way of thinking about artistic practice: as something that carries memory, but also potential.
The artists open spaces where complexity can be held with attention, and courage. They move through family dinners, leaking cups, sacred figures, speculative worlds, diasporic retellings, burning houses, digital statues, inherited memories, photographic archives and collective objects.Their practices do not turn away from inherited structures, silences and histories. Instead, they hold them carefully, asking what can still be repaired, reimagined, and allowed to grow otherwise.
Emerging from the Fine Arts Department of the Sandberg Instituut, the exhibition reflects an environment where artistic development is nurtured. Assessments are not about fitting into fixed standards, but about supporting artists in finding the courage to develop a practice that is autonomous, situated, socially engaged and alive. What matters is not only what is made, but how each artist thinks, reflects, relates and takes responsibility for their own process.
This graduation show is not only a presentation of final works. It is a threshold. What is gathered here is not certainty, not a final harvest, but a field of beginnings. The show looks ahead by asking what art can still make possible: new relations, new responsibilities, and new ways of living with one another.
“From storage to soil, from silence to voice, from inheritance to imagination, the seeds remember…”
– Judith Leysner
Course Director Fine Art department
Graduation Master of Fine Arts 2026
Sandberg Instituut – A Festival of Choices
Kelvin Dijk link
Anna Theunissen pdf
Viltė Čepulytė pdf
Emma Betrán Clos pdf
Alicja Mackiewicz link
Vishakha Bianca pdf
Silvia Zaccaria pdf
Ivalù Chantal pdf
Karina Rovira pdf
Betül Sefika pdf
Matteo Rattini link
Location: Loods6
KNSM Laan 143, Amsterdam
Opening hours:
Wed, 10 June, 19:00–22:00 (Opening)
Thu, 11 June, 12:00–18:00
Fri, 12 June, 12:00–20:00
Sat, 13 June, 12:00–20:00
Sun, 14 June, 12:00–18:00 (Finissage: 15:00–17:00)
Performance Program
Wednesday, 10 June
19:15–19:35
Kelvin Dijk in sonic reflection with Phantom Wizard * As earth turns, soil will be braided
19:45–20:05
Anna Theunissen * A Manual Anomaly
20:35–20:55
Silvia Zaccaria * Sandscapes
21:05–21:25
Alicja Mackiewicz * A shell-roofed cottage
Saturday, 13 June
16:00–16:20
Betül Sefika * Readings
17:30–17:50
Silvia Zaccaria * Sandscapes
18:00–18:15
Anna Theunissen * A Manual Anomaly
18:30–18:50
Kelvin Dijk in sonic reflection with Phantom Wizard * As earth turns, soil will be braided
19:00–19:20
Alicja Mackiewicz * A shell-roofed cottage
Performance descriptions
Kelvin Dijk in sonic reflection with Phantom Wizard
As earth turns, soil will be braided
Duration: 20 minutes
Can hope persevere amidst what appears to be total destruction?
Together with Phantom Wizard, this work facilitates rehearsals for sustaining inspiration and creation within oppressive times. Through our diasporic reinterpretation of the sacred Hindu scripture describing Shiva’s cosmic dance – a dance in which destruction and creation unfold simultaneously – we trace what it might mean to continue living, imagining, and thriving amidst chaos.
Not as a gesture toward catastrophe as necessary evil, but as an insistence on solidarity through resilience. As both of our cultural inheritances are shaped not by one singular lineage but by many entangled histories, we also reflect on what it means to carry long-standing Hindu practices as part of a diasporic identity. Through retelling, we reclaim narrative authority and confront the cultural divisions that persist as colonial afterthoughts within Surinamese society.
In doing so, we hope to move closer to breaking the shackles which still cast shadows on our beloved communities.
And so, making apparent that there is no singular way of being Surinamese.
Anna Theunissen
A Manual Anomaly
Duration: 15 minutes
A manual anomaly is a collection of stories that reflects on a moment in transit; moving between jobs, corporate expectations and understanding how to perform a job.
Silvia Zaccaria
Sandscapes
Duration: 20 minutes
Sandscapes is an audiovisual performance that activates the Library of Objects, an archive of small items gathered through personal encounters with people who donated them. A sand table acts as a place for listening to the subtle sounds of the objects while they transform themselves into narratives. In this space, personal memories and dreams intertwine, shaping an evolving landscape of fragile images.
Alicja Mackiewicz
A shell-roofed cottage
Duration: 20 minutes
Alicja Mackiewicz with Aleksandra Komsta, Magdalena Ostrowska, Asia Jokiel, Zuza Loch
A crocheted lace house is burned in a collective singing ritual, concluded with a reading. Using Bielyi Holos (“white voice”) singing, an Eastern European open-throat vocal tradition historically used to carry sound across distance, the performance addresses inherited ideas of domesticity, female labour, safety, and the idealised nuclear home. The lace house, produced with crochet cotton yarn dipped in wax, functions as both shelter and obstacle. Through fire, voice, and written word, the work attempts to release generational expectations attached to control, perfection, and belonging.
Betül Sefika
Readings
Duration: 20 minutes
Poetry and interplay with the exhibited works
Sandberg Instituut
sandberg.nl/graduation2026
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