Stroom Invest Week 2026

Location: Stroom Den Haag, Hogewal 1-9, The Hague
Date: 15 - 19 June 2026

The PRO Stroom Invest Scheme supports emerging artists in their development and is intended to help retain recent art academy graduates in the city. To encourage reflection on their artistic and professional practice, Stroom invites recipients of the PRO Invest Scheme to participate in the Invest Week one year after receiving the grant.

Dutch and international visiting professionals (curators, established artists, critics, etc.) visit the studios of artists based in The Hague. This intensive week offers artists critical reflection on their work and position, and often serves as a major source of motivation and inspiration. The art professionals and participating artists also visit various art venues and artist-run initiatives throughout the city. These encounters are not only valuable in terms of content and exchange, but also provide artists and curators with an important opportunity to expand their professional networks.

Participating artists
Lisette Alberti, Catelijne Boele, Valerio Conti, Pum van de Koppel, Michal Kucharski, Giorgia Lo Faso, Aron Lodi, Ghazale Moqanaki, Baroeg Mulder, Albina N, Louisiana van Onna, Todor Rabadzhisyki, Shana de Villiers.

Curators and artists
Sabel Gavaldon, Abir Boukhari, Laurie Cluitmans, Evelina Domnitch, Josh Plough, Edward Clydesdale Thomson, Hera Büyüktaşcıyan, Koi Persyn, Shezad Dawood, Ellis Kat.

Sabel Gavaldon is Head of Public Programmes at MACBA, Barcelona. Before that he was the Curator of Gasworks, a London-based organisation known internationally for its residencies programme for artists from Africa, Asia and Latin America. During that period (2018–2023), he presented new commissions by artists including Mercedes Azpilicueta, Adam Khalil, Ingela Ihrman, Bassam Al-Sabah, Libita Sibungu, Isadora Neves Marques, Patricia Domínguez, Eduardo Navarro and Gala Porras-Kim. Together with Manuel Segade he was curator of the touring exhibition “Elements of Vogue: A Case Study of Radical Performance”. First presented at CA2M, Madrid (2017–2018), then at the Museo del Chopo, Mexico City (2019–2020), this exhibition transformed the museum into a dance floor and brought together a multitude of dissident bodies. He recently co-curated “Song for Many Movements” (2024) with María Berríos at MACBA. Other projects include: “Murmurs” at MACBA (2026); “Invocations” at MACBA (2023); “¡Porque tengo lágrimas!” at CaixaForum, Barcelona (2023); “A Thousand Horsepower” at Can Trinxet Factory, L’Hospitalet (2016); “M/Other Tongue” at Tenderpixel, London (2015); and “A Museum of Gesture” at La Capella, Barcelona (2013). He has taught in alternative art education programs (Syllabus III, Komisario Berriak, Escuelita CA2M) and published essays on platforms such as e-flux Journal. He was a La Caixa Foundation Graduate Fellow at the Royal College of Art (2010–2012). In 2016, he was nominated for the ICI New York Independent Vision Curatorial Award.  

Abir Boukhari is a Syrian Swedish curator based in Stockholm, awarded the Stockholm City Cultural Scholarship (2021) and the Art Promoter of the Year award in Sweden (2025). Her curatorial practice focuses on international collaboration, transnational dialogue, and the role of art in contexts shaped by migration, displacement, and cultural exchange. She is currently developing the Exile City Pavilion for the Gwangju Biennale, scheduled for 2026. Boukhari is co founder and director of AllArtNow since 2005 and founder of Extension Art Space. Through both initiatives she has built an international curatorial practice that connects artists, curators, and institutions across Europe, the Middle East, North Africa, and North America. Her work often explores how artistic practices move across borders and how cultural production can respond to political transformation, collective memory, and shifting identities. Many of her projects create encounters between artists from different regions, forming temporary networks of dialogue through exhibitions, research platforms, and residency programs. Over the past two decades Boukhari has curated and co-curated numerous international exhibitions and collaborative projects including Moderna Museet, Botkyrka Konsthall, World Cultural Museum, Sormlands Museum in Sweden, Pori Museum in Finland, Bornholm Museum in Denmark and Videoformes Festival in France. Her curatorial projects have taken place in cities including Stockholm, Barcelona, Copenhagen, Cairo, Naples, Algiers, Tunis, Winnipeg, and Los Angeles. Boukhari studied curatorial practice at Konstfack University of Arts, Crafts and Design through CuratorLab. Her work continues to develop international platforms for artistic exchange while maintaining a strong commitment to independent curatorial initiatives.

Laurie Cluitmans is a curator, writer and researcher. Since January 2026 she works as Director of Nest in The Hague. Nest is a center for contemporary art that develops and hosts group exhibitions, talks, workshops and other presentations, both inside and outside the walls of the exhibition space. Each program reflects on current societal themes and issues. Through collaboration - with artists, curators and the audience - Nest has created a strong community. 
Before joining Nest, Cluitmans was Curator of Contemporary Art at the Centraal Museum, where she anchored the position of contemporary art through a program that balanced topicality and historical roots; temporary interventions and long-term research programs; local embeddedness and international collaboration. Cluitmans curated a.o. transhistorical research exhibitions such as The Botanical Revolution in 2021 for which she compiled and edited the publication On the Necessity of Gardening; An ABC on Art, Botany and Cultivation (designed by Bart de Baets) and Good Mom/Bad Mom in 2025, which was accompanied by Mothering Myths: An ABC on Art, Birth and Care (icw Heske ten Cate). Besides she curated many solo exhibitions, a.o. with Ansuya Blom, Pauline Curnier Jardin, Rory Pilgrim and (currently on view) Sara Sejin Chang (Sara van der Heide). In addition to her curatorial work Cluitmans is a regular contributor to magazines such as MetropolisM and De Witte Raaf.   

Evelina Domnitch creates multisensory installations and performances that merge the physical sciences with uncanny philosophical practices. Investigating questions of perception and perpetuity, her artworks exist as ever-transforming phenomena offered for observation. Because these exotic physical phenomena take place directly in front of the observer without being intermediated, they serve to vastly extend the sensory threshold. The immediacy of this experience allows the observer to transcend the illusory distinction between scientific discovery and perceptual expansion. Her practice has emerged through collaborations with pioneering research groups, including LIGO (Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory), EU Quantum Flagship, and Aerospace Engineering (TU Delft). She is a recipient of the Witteveen+Bos Award (2019), Meru Art*Science Award (2018),  Japan Media Arts Excellence Prize (2007) and five Ars Electronica Honorary Mentions (2007, 2009, 2011, 2013, 2017). Domnitch has exhibited at Martin-Gropius-Bau (Berlin), the Venice Biennial, MAXXI Museum of 21st Century Art (Rome), Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art (Helsinki) and the National Museum of Modern Art (Tokyo). 

Josh Plough is an educator, editor, and researcher who focuses on the world of design, art, and culture and their position within the webs of politics, ecologies, and futures. Currently based in Warsaw, he lectures at School of Form and runs the cultural foundation Ziemniaki i and the city’s first public library for art and design research. The foundation publishes, organises residencies and capacity-building workshops and it’s currently raising money to provide scholarships and reporting-free grants. He has mentored projects organised by the European Space Agency, the New European Bauhaus and the SPLOT Institute. He is the co-initiator of FRINGE Warszawa, a four-day event that platforms artist-run spaces in Warsaw. In 2022, he received the Fondazione Fitzcarraldo scholarship in Cultural Policies at Conservatorio della Svizzera Italiana and is a contributing writer for publications including DAMN Magazine, Revista-ARTA, Dialogue, FORMY, CritiCALL!, Current Obsession, and The Future of. In 2025, his foundation received the European Sustainable Promotion of Culture Nonprofit of the Year award. He is also an executive committee member of the Reset! Network. 

Edward Clydesdale Thomson (1982, Scotland, lives in Kolderveen, NL) is a visual artist and, together with Priscila Fernandes, head of the Bachelor of Fine Arts (BEAR) department at ArtEZ University of the Arts. He is also co-director of Kunstwerk Kolderveen, a production house for artists and an international residency programme in Kolderveen (NL). He is the founder of Stichting Landfall, an interdisciplinary network for artistic research, knowledge-sharing, and production, aimed at supporting and promoting art and culture. Selected exhibitions and commissions include: rivier, boot, stad, Dordrechts Museum, 2024; The Space You Occupy, Paltz Biënnale, 2024; CALM BEFORE THE STORM, Radius, 2022; freedom from fear, Façade Biënnale, 2022; Where Shall We Plant the Placenta?, A Tale of A Tub, 2022; The Grazer Kunstverein is Moving, Grazer Kunstverein, 2020; Out of Darkness, Into Nature, 2018; An Exhibition of Posters, Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art, 2018; wild care, tame neglect, Frankendael Foundation, 2018; The Society Machine, Malmö Konstmuseum, 2016; Nothin’ Shakin’ but the Leaves on the Trees, Marabouparken Konsthall, 2015; and Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain, CCA Derry~Londonderry, 2015. He has been an artist-in-residence at the Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten, IASPIS, and the Irish Museum of Modern Art.

Hera Büyüktaşcıyan (b.1984 Istanbul) is an artist whose multidisciplinary practice derives from the notion of absence within poetics of space & time in by diving into the depths of narratives that derive from architectural memory and the ruptures in socio-political histories . Büyüktaşcıyan participated in several local and international exhibitions such as: ARTER(2025); Taipei Biennale(2025); Bukhara Biennale (2025); Lentos Museum(2024);EMST National Museum of Contemporary Art Athens (2023);CIAP Vassiviere(2023);  Tate St.Ives(2023) ;14thGwangju Biennale(2023) ,Tate Modern(2022); British Museum (2021); New Museum Triennale(2021);3rd and 4th  Autostrada Biennale (2021-23); The British Museum(2020), 2nd Lahore Biennale(2020);1st Inaugural Toronto Biennale(2019); ifa-Galerie Berlin (2019); Dhaka Art Summit, (2018); EVA International Ireland’s Biennale (2016); 14th Istanbul Biennale(2015); 56th Venice Biennale – National Pavilion of Armenia(2015); State of Concept(2015); SALT Beyoğlu(2015);The Jerusalem ShowVII(2014); Galeri Mana (2014); ARTER(2013); PiST///Interdisciplinary Project Space (2013) 

Koi Persyn (b. 1996, BE) is a curator based in Brussels. His curated projects focus on process-based and hybrid practices that investigate the social fabric of public and urban space. Persyn was the artistic director (2024-2025) of Jester, a meeting ground for the development and presentation of contemporary art in Genk. He was co-director (2023-2024) and curator (2021-2023) of Komplot - a curatorial collective and art space in Brussels - and project coordinator of Cas-co, a residency and studio organisation in Leuven (2022-2024). Simultaneously, he was active as a guest lecturer at La Cambre in Brussels. Together with Anna Laganovska, he curated Border Buda, an exhibition with temporary and permanent art commissions in the border area of Brussels, Vilvoorde and Machelen (2023-2024). Together with Laila Melchior, he was awarded the Lichen Curatorial Prize (as a laureate selected by CIAP and Curatorial Studies) and executed their exhibition proposal Three Tropes for Entropy at CIAP in Genk (2022). Persyn worked as a mediator for the Belgian Pavilion at the 58th Venice Biennale as part of the Young Curators Programme (2019). He wrote for the art magazine Glean and was a member of the advisory groups of S.M.A.K., MSK, both in Ghent, and for the Platform Kunst In Opdracht, Flemish Government. He obtained a master’s degree in Fine Arts (2019), followed by a postgraduate degree in Curatorial Studies (2020), both at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Ghent. During his studies, Persyn initiated and co-curated a three-year residency programme at Het Paviljoen in Ghent. 

Shezad Dawood is a multidisciplinary artist and Senior Research Fellow in Experimental Media at the University of Westminster. Working across painting, textiles, sculpture, film, and digital media, Dawood explores narrative, history, and speculative futures through what he calls “world-building”.  Selected solo exhibitions include: Skin of Dreams, Cultural Foundation, Abu Dhabi (2026); A Garden of the Floating World, Jhaveri Contemporary, Mumbai (2025); Leviathan, Salisbury Cathedral, Salisbury, UK (2023); Night in the Garden of Love, WIELS, Brussels (2023). Selected group exhibitions include: For All At Last Return, Baltic Center for Contemporary Art, Newcastle (2025); Horizon and Limit, La Caixa Forum, Barcelona (2024); Horror in the Modernist Block, IKON, Birmingham (2023). His works have been exhibited in numerous biennials including the Venice Biennale, Gwangju Biennale, Sharjah Biennial, Lahore Biennial, Taipei Biennial, Toronto Biennial of Art, Desert X, Dhaka Art Summit, and Manifesta.  Selected collections include Guggenheim; Tate; LACMA; National Gallery of Canada; The British Museum, London; Deutsche Bank; the UK and US Government Art Collections; the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, Delhi; Seoul Museum of Art, Seoul; Rubin Museum of Art, New York; UBS; Mathaf, Doha; Sharjah Art Foundation, Sharjah. 

Ellis Kat (1993) is a curator, moderator, and writer. Until 2025, she was the director of Nieuw Dakota in Amsterdam, where she developed a programme that blurred disciplinary boundaries and created space for experimentation. As a freelance curator, she has worked with institutions including Museum Cobra, Stedelijk Museum Schiedam, and Kunstinstituut Melly. Her exhibitions are thought-provoking and stretch the meaning of what art can be. She challenges both artists and audiences to look differently: at art, but also at the world around us. In addition, she is affiliated with the Amsterdam Fund for the Arts as an advisor.