Stroom Invest Week 2023

The annual Stroom Invest Week is an inspiring program for young talented Hague artists and visiting art professionals, linked to the PRO Invest grant.

This grant provides a constructive contribution to the professional development of the artists.
The goal of the Stroom Invest Week is to:
(a) offer talented artists high-quality reflection and constructive criticism of their work,
(b) contribute to strengthening and broadening their networks and contacts,
(c) introduce visiting professional artists and curators to the international Hague arts scene and artistic climate through informal visits to various art institutions.

The artists participating in the Invest Week 2023 received a PRO Invest grant in 2022. They are (in alphabetical order):

Koen Bartijn
Koen Bartijn (1992) is artistic director, dramaturg, researcher, and initiator in both the performing and visual arts. He is the founder of art collective Antidote, with which he organizes festivals and performances. In addition, from 2020 to 2023 he was co-director of Platform Beeldende Kunst, a membership association and active think tank that explores and strives to promote the role of art in society and fights for a better art climate and a stronger position of the artist. Since 2022, Bartijn has been artistic director of art initiative VHDG a presentation institution in Leeuwarden. He began his career in the cultural sector at Stichting W139 and in 2019 founded the international performance art movement Antidote, which among other things resulted in the Antidote Festival. His main focus in the arts is to transform current institutional work environments. All of his initiatives and work aim to achieve communality and solidarity within the practice of art realization, thus strengthening the position of the artist and creating strong links create strong ties between art and society.

Semâ Bekirovic
Semâ Bekirovic (Netherlands, 1977) studied in Amsterdam at the Rietveld Academy and was a resident at the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten in 2005-2006. Her work is best described as playful conceptualism and is often inspired by scientific ideas and concepts. It has been exhibited in various venues, including the Hayward Gallery, London (solo, 2010); Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam (2007, 2013, 2015); Dutch Culture Institute, Shanghai (2010); MoMa PS1, New York (2012); Kunstfort Vijfhuizen (2016); Marres, Maastricht (2017); Nest, The Hague (2018); GEM, The Hague (2019); Garage Rotterdam (2020); Klub Solitaer, Chemnitz (solo, 2020); Into Nature Biennale; Paltz Biennale and the Bruges Triennale (all in 2021). Bekirovic currently has a solo exhibition Once an Alien at presentation space Rozenstraat - a rose is a rose is a rose in Amsterdam.
www. semabekirovic.nl
www.rozenstraat.com/event/sema-bekirovic/

Marijke Cobbenhagen
Marijke Cobbenhagen (1978) is, among other things, founder (in 2007) and artistic director of The Grey Space in the Middle in The Hague. She is a lecturer at various educational institutions, including Royal Academy of Art in The Hague, California College of Arts in San Francisco, OTIS College of Art and Design Los Angeles, Academy of Architecture Amsterdam and HKU Media Utrecht. She calls herself a designer of dialogue. Her focus is on developing formats that create an exciting space to share art, knowledge and experimentation.

Victorine Grataloup
Victorine Grataloup is currently director of Triangle-Astérides, center for contemporary art and artists' residency in Marseilles (France). She is a curator and the co-founder of the trilingual research and publishing platform Qalqalah ????? (with Line Ajan, Virginie Bobin, Montasser Drissi, Vir Andres Hera and Salma Mochtari). She grew up in Drancy in Seine-Saint-Denis, studied art history and theory at EHESS (Paris), Humboldt Universität (Berlin) and Université Paris I Panthéon-Sorbonne, where she then taught art economics for six years; and previously worked at Palais de Tokyo, KADIST, Bétonsalon - center d'art et de recherche, Cneai, and an independent curator. Her work is transdisciplinary and collaborative, at the intersection of artistic and social issues at the crossroads of languages.

Melanie Jackson
Melanie Jackson (UK) works with modes of non-fiction storytelling through assemblages of sculpture, writing and moving image. She works with tactics of representation which remain provisional rather than definitive, treating the gallery (and beyond) as a stage for experimentation with art roles: mimicry, documentary, myth fabrication, science, performance, animation, political commentary, music, installation, craft and the cultivation of aesthetic delight. Recent exhibitions include Milk, Wellcome Collection (until September 2023); Spekyng Rybawdy in Block 336,(2022); Deeper in the Pyramid at Grand Union (Birmingham); Primary (Nottingham) and Banner Repeater (London all 2018); The Urpflanze Part 2 (2013) and The Urpflanze Part 1 (2010) at the Drawing Room and Flat Time House (London). She has also made solo exhibitions at Space Exchange (Colchester), Chapter (Cardiff), Matt's Gallery (London) and Arnolfini (Bristol) and exhibited internationally in group exhibitions including eva (Ireland), Take Me to the River, DRF Biennale (Osaka, Japan); The Global Contemporary; ZKM Museum of Contemporary Art  (Karlsruhe, Germany). She teaches as part of her practice, currently Tutor in Sculpture and Research at the Royal College of Art, London.
www.melaniejackson.net

Clara Pallí Monguilod
Clara Pallí Monguilod (Spain, 1978) holds a Bachelor degree in Fine Arts and a Master Artistic Research from the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague. Since 2004, alongside a career as a visual artist, she has been devoted to co-curating and co-directing Art Space 1646 in The Hague.
At 1646, drawing from her background as an artist, Pallí supported over two hundred local and international artists to produce new work and to share it with an audience. With a focus on solo-exhibitions, 1646 offers a public program of artist talks, events, publications, dialogues, podcasts and a residency program. The program at 1646 resonates with the interests of its directors, revolving around artistic strategies such as fictioning, complicating and humour. They have focussed on understanding fiction as an essential instrument to help imagine the world differently, embracing and celebrating complexity, and examining contradiction and paradox as inherent qualities of human existence. As well, using play and humour as tools needed to maintain an open attitude.
Additionally, in her own artistic practice Pallí has a special interest in existential questioning, the act of revealing and obscuring all at once, the strange and the mystical as well as thinking on what role art can play in all these wonderings www.clarapalli.com

Joachim Naudts (1982) is general & artistic coordinator of Kunsthal Extra City in Antwerp. He has curated over 30 exhibitions, most of them for FOMU (museum of photography, Antwerp, Belgium).Starting from the challenges posed by our current human condition, his focus has been on political and engaged work. He worked on solo exhibitions with artists such as Rabih Mroué, Boris Mikhailov, Lynne Cohen, Andrea Stultiens, Patrick Waterhouse, Bieke Depoorter and Broomberg & Chanarin. Large thematic shows and book publications include Radically Naive / Naively Radical, The Still Point of the Turning World (co-curated with David Campany), Maan/Moon and Mijn vlakke land (both co-curated with Maarten Dings) and Power! Photos! Freedom! (in collaboration with Human Rights Watch). He used to be editor for the FOMU magazines .tiff and Extra and is currently still involved with their magazine Trigger. He is regularly invited as a jury-member, speaker, curator, author, advisor, and guest teacher in the field of contemporary art and photography.
www.extracity.org
www.trigger-mag.be

Charles Rouleau (Canada, 1988) is the coordinator of Casino Display - Space for Artistic Research, the research-oriented satellite of Casino Luxembourg. There he is the curator of an artist residency and has also instigated an Artistic Research Lab which focuses on collective thinking and creation, Based on a practice-led approach to knowledge production, Casino Display is a transdisciplinary meeting point relying on the logic of experimentation for the emergence of unchartered knowledge, for trying out unfinished ideas, probing freshly sketched concepts, or reversing solid ontologies in favour of fluid ones. In short this is a space led by the drive for experimentation and the unknown. He has also edited a volume for the research project Woven in Vegetal Fabric: On Plant Becomings, project for which he acted as artist-curator. Furthermore, he has been a guest speaker at the University of Amsterdam, at the ASCA's Artistic Research Research Group, at the École Offshore and at ÉSAL Metz.
www.casino-luxembourg.lu

Roy Voragen
Roy Voragen (1974) studied philosophy and political theory at the University of Amsterdam. He is a curator at Greylight Projects in Heerlen, a research supervisor at Willem de Kooning Academy in Rotterdam, and a freelance art writer. He lived and worked in Southeast Asia from 2003 to 2019. He taught philosophy at universities in Indonesia, where he lived between 2003 and 2017. Between 2017 and 2019 he was artistic director of 1335MABINI in Manila. And he curated exhibitions and projects in Bandung, Yogyakarta, Jakarta, Manila, Singapore, Hong Kong, Yokohama, Kuala Lumpur, Maastricht, Heerlen, Diepenheim, Athens and Aachen.

Het resort: Ellen de Haan & Daphne Verberg
Het resort is an experimental and traveling art initiative in Groningen that develops its own approach in presenting art from a series of activities. It seeks an interaction between artists and environments through which new ways of working and contexts emerge. The nomadic form of the resort offers the possibility of always looking at the free space a city has and where art can exist. Artists are asked to create new work specifically for the chosen locations. Previous locations include: Foyer of NNT + Club Guy&Roni, BIM gas station, outdoor swimming pool De Papiermolen, Music Dome in the Sterrebos, former men's sauna 't Pakhuisje, Oude-Pekela, skating rink Kardinge. The program consists of residencies with subsequent exhibitions, a talent track and projects. The resort produces videos about the residencies, makes souvenirs and issues in-house publications.

Ellen de Haan (1991) is graphic designer and consultant. She is co-founder and together with Daphne Verberg co-director of het resort. Based on a love for printed matter, she is co-organizer of SPREAD zinefest and publishes and designs the publications of het resort. Previously, De Haan has created projects for starting artists, such as the post-graduate mentoring program about:blank and sales platform De salon. Many of the initiatives she works on come from a DIY background and focus on supporting makers. In addition, De Haan is committed to increasing the ownership and control of artists within the arts field, by organizing events like the Fair Practice Code Symposium (Noordenaars x Platform BK), Midstream seminar (the resort) and A Series of Essays (the resort x Dagblad van het Noorden). In recent years she has worked for Mondriaan Fund, Academie Minerva, Noordenaars, Kunstpunt Groningen, BNO, among others. She lives and works in Groningen and studied graphic design at Academie Minerva.
www.ellendehaan.com

Daphne Verberg (1993) is codirector of het resort as of September 1. She studied art education ArtEZ and obtained a Master's degree in Art History: Curatorial Studies from the University of Groningen. For the past 5 years she produced Nest's multifaceted program in The Hague. She has also worked for various organizations and institutions, including the Fries Museum, the Mondriaan Fund, the Royal Academy of Art and CBK Groningen (now Kunstpunt). Verberg lives in The Hague and works as a freelance curator and producer.