Voicing responsibility

Is a space and time-limited virtual exhibition. You can join us on Instagram for lots of stories by the artists and visit the website that we created for the show. Practising responsibility as a tool for imagining future meanings is an opportunity to bring fulfilment to our lives. In “The Unbearable Lightness of Being” (1984), Milan Kundera questions heaviness and lightness—pondering which is negative and which is positive, responsibility or freedom? Kundera writes, “The heavier the burden, the closer our lives come to the earth, the more real and truthful they become” (1984, p. 3). Despite its weight, responsibility brings value as a counterweight. It forces us to take a position in the world and navigate accordingly.

Beyond the individual

In the context of artistic practices, responsibility intertwines with the artist’s awareness of their lived environment and often incorporates a sense of duty toward ensuring sustainable futures. This responsibility enriches their practice, bringing it deeper beyond the individual. The virtual exhibition therefore embodies the harmonious integration of responsibility. After all, creating the future we want requires us to.

As an artist-run organisation, we feel a responsibility to support sustainability in artistic practices. Same for providing peers with space, time and a platform to express their perspectives on urgent contemporary topics. This virtual exhibition represents a culmination of our efforts to bring attention to the value of responsibility; to leave things better than when we found them. By hosting this exhibition of expressions on Responsibility on our website, we ensure that it is accessible to audiences worldwide, allowing the messages of these artists to reach and resonate with a diverse and expansive audience.

Co-creation

Seven artists, one artist collaboration and two art collectives have contributed with their work, making this project a virtuality in reality. Each participant has thoughtfully engaged with the theme of responsibility, expressing their unique perspectives. The contributions span various mediums and styles, reflecting the rich diversity within the artistic community of SEA Foundation. By showcasing these interpretations, we aim to explore what responsibility, means while highlighting its significance from multiple angles. Our collaborative effort underscores the importance of bridging dialogue and creativity in addressing complex societal issues like responsibility and its connection to a collective sustainable future.

You can enter the virtual exhibition by clicking here

Participating artists;

Sofia Kaloterakis (Vision Quest) is a poet, artist, and holistic healer who combines these disciplines to create works that help people connect with themselves, nature, and the universe. She primarily works with sound, poetry, ritual, guided meditations, and performance. Vision Quest has been publishing and performing work in the Netherlands and throughout Europe.
Sofia Kaloterakis: website, Instagram

Meii Soh (they/them) is a Portuguese researcher and performance artist based between Berlin and Amsterdam. As a result of their upbringing within a family of on-land and sea hunters, Meii delves into how movement, sound, and digital tools hold fundamental spaces for interspecies communication. Meii holds a BFA from the University of Lisbon, Portugal (2014-2018) and completed their Master’s in Artistic Research in 2024 at the Dutch Art Institute, in the Netherlands.
Meii Soh: website, Instagram

Cecilie Fang is an anti-disciplinary artist and writer from China and Denmark currently based in The Hague. Her work is a continuous auto-ethnographic research, in which she researches power structures through and with language. She is interested in how language is an ecosystem when it is mouldable, mutable and shaping bodies in any way. Currently, she is working to create work exploring alternative ways of languaging (looking upon meaning production as not fixed, but open-ended and process-oriented) and possible methods of coming together.
Cecilie Fang: website, Instagram

Beatrice Cera is an Italian art worker, curator, and designer who lives in The Hague. Since all forms of life on this planet are interconnected, moving towards a radical manifestation of care feels crucial to her. Seeing art as a means for social communication and political change, Beatrice takes the stance of a collective practice as a process to foster political responsibility. In her work, both as a maker and facilitator, it is important to hold space for collectivity, as a counter-narrative to a hyper-individualistic way of living. She contributes to contemporary art practices as a writer, educator, and radio maker.
Beatrice Cera: website, Instagram

Islam Abdelkader identifies as an architect and an artist. He works and lives in Utrecht, The Netherlands. He completed a Master in Interior Architecture in Maastricht in 2022 and right after, Islam Abdelkader followed his passion by studying Ceramics at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam. Ranging from clay, wood, paper, and plaster, to cement, Islam’s artistic practice focuses on exploring the boundless potential of materials through sculptures, installations and site-specific interventions.   
Islam Abdelkader: website, Instagram

Letsgettothepoint is a collective of three design researchers who have combined their practices to explore the meaning of “collectiveness” in both group settings and the wider design world. They develop methodologies and create narratives, finding formats that suit workshop-based research and performative expressions, aiming to challenge and rethink the regulations, reflecting society’s evolving views on the subject.  Letsgettothepoint’s work is a continuous journey of exploring and addressing “caring frictions” within the field of design.
Letsgettothepoint: Instagram

DIHAN reads is a self-initiated platform open to everyone who is in for experiments and shared experiences. It has been active since March 2023 within the context of “DIHAN performative evenings”. Taking Antiquariaat Berger en de Vries (Groningen) as their main location, they let themselves be guided during their encounters by openness in their choice of subjects and textual input in a playful, performative, and experimental manner. Through several different approaches, they explore written and unwritten thoughts and reflections.
DIHAN: Instagram

Bhavneet Kaur is an interdisciplinary artist & designer based in India, working across spatial design, publication and artistic research. Her creative practice explores the thematics of body & identity, ancestral memory, colonial narratives and questions of modernity. Deeply rooted in a kinaesthetic inquiry, she manifests through installations, objects, texts and performance. She explores Indigenous cultures using methods influenced by every day and traditional practices, focusing on the diverse cultures in India. Kaur considers her creative practice nomadic and informed by situated learning. Subjective context is invariably universal. Currently, she is part of a Netherlands-based collective, Fauxbia.
Bhavneet Kaur: website, Instagram

Kexin Hong was born in China, and lives and works in the Netherlands, as a multidisciplinary artist, she employs various media including, video, sculpture, and digital fabrication to explore political issues on digital platforms and in sociology. Kexin Hong is fascinated by the boundaries between reality and virtuality, as well as the real and the imaginary; Her research delves into the impact of post-colonial trauma on the self-projection mechanisms among individuals in the post-truth era. Kexin intends to investigate how political images achieve a fictional “authenticity” while affirming themselves in reverse.
Kexin Hong: website, Instagram

Marianna Maruyama (The Hague) and Jan Adriaans (Rotterdam) are actively practising multi-modal artists. As frequent collaborators, they meet regularly in person for their so-called “Swim Team” writing practice, and online for collective writing sessions, finding an interesting relationship between consistency and responsibility. Showing up for a group practice is an act of responsibility towards ourselves demonstrating self-compassion and self-respect. At the same time, coming together expresses responsibility towards others because it allows us to find ourselves within a larger artistic community. Adriaans and Maruyama were previously A-I-R at Het Vijfde Seizoen on the psychiatric campus of Den Dolder, together with Gerwin Luijendijk. Their bi-lingual (EN/NL) publication, Performing Security (2019), dealt with their personal experiences with the security team, as well as bigger questions around perceived safety and psychology immediately following a violent episode in the area.
Marianna Maruyama and Jan Adriaans:  Marianna’s website, Jan’s website