What to See During Amsterdam Art Week 2025

Augusta Curiel | FOAM | 23 May – 6 November 

FOAM hosts Surinamese photographer Augusta Curiel’s first European retrospective on the 50th anniversary of the country’s independence – smack in the capital of its former colonial ruler, the Netherlands. Taken between 1904 and 1937, the artist’s documentary photographs, of which more than 100 are on display here, are arguably most interesting for what’s left out of the frame. Curiel, whose Paramaribo studio was popular for commissions from Dutch authorities and their boosters, presents an illuminating yet rose-tinted historical view of a ‘prosperous’ colony. In one shot from 1928, for instance, sharply dressed locals look out at an anchored Dutch war ship under two archly pruned trees, the work’s skilled composition and contrast belying an uneasy peace.

‘1985 – 2025’ | Fons Welters | 22 May – 25 July 

Fons Welters, a stalwart of Amsterdam’s gallery scene, celebrates its 40th anniversary with a retrospective exhibition, ahead of its planned closure in September of this year. The group show brings together works by artists from Fons Welters’s impressive roster, including Tom Claassen, Maria Roosen and Berend Strik – each of whom has been connected to the gallery for more than 30 years. Younger members of the fold are also featured, including Dutch sculptor Magali Reus and Brazilian installation artist Adriano Amaral. In a commemorative gesture, both Roosen and Evelyn Taocheng Wang contribute works featuring rubies – the symbolic jewel denoting 40 years. Roosen’s offering is the drooping glass sculpture Ruby (2025); Wang’s, the playful pastel painting Frog-Princess Flies into Diamond Ruby (2025). August will see the publication of an accompanying catalogue that rounds out Fons Welters’s impressive run with essays, interviews and a photographic survey of exhibition highlights.

Melanie Bonajo | AKINCI | 21 May – 12 July 

In addition to representing the Netherlands at the Venice Biennale in 2022, Melanie Bonajo is, according to AKINCI’s website, a ‘sexological bodyworker, somatic sex coach, cuddle workshop facilitator and activist’. Their plush, colourful installations and trill identity-speak are the type of thing to make right-wingers squirm. At AKINCI, Bonajo screens three of their recent video works in site-specific viewing installations and scenography co-designed with Théo Demans, including Schule der Liebenden (School of Lovers, 2024), shown here for the first time in the Netherlands. Made in collaboration with cognitively disabled performers, the work is a cheerful, pseudo sex-education film – the kind Bonajo wishes existed. At one juncture, a man clothed in cut-up stuffed animals asks, ‘Who knows what a clitoris is?’ Even if Bonajo’s work might not be your queer cup of tea, it’s delightfully provocative either way.

Arturo Kameya | GRIMM | 22 May – 19 July 

At GRIMM Gallery, Arturo Kameya’s muted paintings offer an intriguing sojourn through the mundane yet precious ephemera of his childhood in Peru. The 12 works on display in the gallery’s grand, canal-house space splice pop-visual images such as Coca-Cola ads, football jerseys and the Pope. These works find their most intriguing form in the instances where Kemeya has carved his wooden canvases into unique sculptural objects, as in Torino de Talara (2025). A recent graduate of the city’s Rijksakademie, whose open studios are also not to be missed during Amsterdam Art Week, Kameya cites Édouard Glissant’s writings on postcolonial identity as inspiration in the exhibition literature. In these paintings, traces of Kameya’s own identity, like metaphorical islands, disappear into the ocean of globalism that is his life. 

Pamela Rosenkranz | Stedelijk Museum | 21 May – 24 August 

A perverse, immersive wonderland awaits at the Stedelijk, where Pamela Rosenkranz opens her first solo exhibition in the Netherlands. It contains hits, including a reinstallation of the fleshy liquid pool Our Product (2015), originally unveiled in the Swiss Pavilion at the Venice Biennale, and her collection of skin-toned, silicone-filled water bottles, ‘Firm Being’ (2009–ongoing), that still have the capacity to disturb. The museum places one of Yves Klein’s ‘Blue Monochrome’ paintings from its collection (L’accord bleu (RE 10), 1960) alongside several of Rosenkranz's own bold blue series (‘Because they tried to bore holes in my greatest and most beautiful work’, 2012, and ‘Alien Blue Windows’, 2017-present) to demonstrate what the exhibition literature refers to as her ‘biologically informed approach to colour’s spiritual power’. Sure to be Instagrammed.

‘OFFSPRING 2025’ | De Ateliers | 15 May – 1 June

De Ateliers, one of Amsterdam’s esteemed postgraduate residency programs, hosts ‘OFFSPRING 2025’. Curated by Eliel Jones of KANAL–Centre Pompidou, this two-week open-studio event features individual and collective works by the resident artists: Lizzy Deacon, Greta Eimulytė, Flora Fritz, Levi van Gelder, Lorian Gwynn, Swan Lee, Ruoru Mou, Tumelo Mtimkhulu, Sofía Salazar Rosales and Finn Theuws. Fittingly subtitled ‘enter through the back door’, the exhibition starts in the former caretaker’s house at the rear of the building before unravelling across the cavernous interiors of the 1874 former home of the Rijksakademie. 

Nuri Bilge Ceylan | EYE Filmmuseum | 18 January – 1 June

A great of contemporary Turkish cinema, Nuri Bilge Ceylan gets his due in this breathtaking survey at the EYE Filmmuseum. The exhibition’s star is his ‘Turkey Cinemascope’ photo series (2003–12) depicting lonely Anatolian villages and Istanbul street scenes. Printed in the extremely wide CinemaScope format, the 16 photographs on display feel like stills from lost reels. Here, they are shown together for the first time with excerpts from seven of Ceylan’s films. With everyday subjects dotting stark and snowy landscapes, many of the compositions feel like modern-day equivalents to Pieter Bruegel’s 16th-century canvases – rich with social commentary about a nation in tension.

^{Main image: Augusta Curiel, Werklozendemonstratie in Paramaribo in 1931 naar aanleiding van de economische crisis (Unemployed demonstration in Paramaribo in 1931 in response to the economic crisis), 1931, photograph. Courtesy: Rijksmuseum Collection, Amsterdam}