DAI is absolutely thrilled to know that the Van Abbemuseum appoints our very dear and inspirational friend and long time (since 2008 !) collaborator / tutor / COOP leader Yolande Zola Zoli van der Heide as their new Exhibitions Curator. She will be dearly missed as one of the two ROCKS in our ongoing affiliation with Casco Art Institute: Working for the Commons. That said: we are looking forward to see how their feminist thinking and commonist touch will brilliantly affect the Van Abbe Museum ( anonther of DAI's longstanding and cherished institutional friends).
The Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven announces the appointment of Yolande Zola Zoli van der Heide as Exhibitions Curator. She succeeds Annie Fletcher, who was appointed as director of the Irish Museum of Modern Art in Dublin at the beginning of this year. Van der Heide will curate exhibitions for the Van Abbemuseum and contribute to the museum’s programme in which research, the collection, temporary activities, exhibitions, artistic practice and active collaboration with the public come together. As curator Van der Heide is interested in influencing art institutional practices with intersecting perspectives.
Charles Esche, director Van Abbemuseum: “I am delighted to welcome Yolande to the museum as an excellent successor to Annie Fletcher. She has the right mix of experience in the Netherlands and abroad to curate exhibitions with international appeal. She is also a great collaborator with people and constituencies and knows how to bring the interests of art and society closer together. We are looking forward to the new energy and ideas she will bring to the museum.”
Van der Heide states: I am honoured and humbled to be welcomed into the Van Abbemuseum, whose exhibitions and programming encourage constituents to lean into the trouble, question, and express themselves when all is not known towards prefiguring more just ways of being together. I look forward to working with my new colleagues to continue to broaden how a museum with a demodernist agenda functions.”
Previously Yolande van der Heide was deputy director at Casco Art Institute: Working for the Commons, a nonprofit art institute in Utrecht, The Netherlands. There she coorganised exhibitions, assemblies and events such as Het is of de stenen spreken (silence is a commons) with artists Ama Josephine Budge, Ansuya Blom, Babi Badalov, and Mire Lee (2019) and Curating Strategies of Productive Refusal with Gabi Ngcobo (2019). Since 2010 Van der Heide is a faculty member at the Dutch Art Institute, Roaming Academy in Arnhem and since 2016 she a thesis advisor at the Sandberg Institute in Amsterdam.