de sjwadesjwa@proton.me
Essential Interest to Dutch Culture Oct 2025Eindhoven NL

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Essential Interest to Dutch Culture



A temporary exhibition by and for non-EU creatives in the Netherlands.

  1. HaYoung Kim, Basak Tuna, Ramon Jimenez Cardenas, Seungwhan Ji,Daniel Alykam, Bruno Baietto, Hsin Min Chan, Chiao Hsu, Metincan Guzel  
  2. Phoebe Zoe Ho, Shin Hua, Shun Chih Chang
  3. Walter Mingeldorf
  4. Ege Yılmaztürk, Yufei Guo, Mira Ying, Kaan Hicyilmaz
  5. Yuky K ,  Jaskarn Singh Hanspal
  6. Shin Hua, Shun-Chih Chang, Yulin Yao, Alice Wan, David Hernandez, Ege Yılmaztürk, Yufei Guo, Kaan Hicyilmaz, Carolina Perez Moreno

Culture is a practice of relation rather than a possession. It lives in gestures, translation, and the quiet work of making things possible together. Yet in the Netherlands today, the idea of “Dutch culture” is increasingly caught between pride and precarity: celebrated as progressive and open, while being administratively guarded by borders and categories.

“Dutch Design” sits within this tension. National institutions describe it as an attitude - curious, experimental, independent of nationality. However for many designers who live and work here without an EU passport, that openness ends at the level of paperwork and signatures. Crucially, to stay, they must prove that their work is of essential interest to Dutch culture.

This exhibition reclaims that phrase as a site of reflection and solidarity. Developed through a collective curatorial process, Essential Interest to Dutch Culture gathers together as curators a set of designers who have encountered the visa system not as abstraction but as lived experience. Together, they have shaped the exhibition’s form, language, and spatial logic, transforming Kruisstraat 185 into a porous environment where culture is re-imagined from the ground up.

Within a space previously occupied by the local council, and on a street known for its multiplicity of voices, businesses, and histories, Dutch culture is understood not as heritage, but as a practice of cohabitation: a constantly changing composition of people, skills, and imaginations. The works presented speak of bureaucracy and belonging, of making and unmaking: of the quiet negotiations that sustain life between systems.

At a time marked by alienation and social fragmentation, Essential Interest to Dutch Culture insists that the vitality of Dutch culture depends precisely on those who are most often asked to justify their place within it. To narrow the definition of who counts as “essential” is to risk losing the very openness that has defined Dutch design’s global significance.

Here, culture is reclaimed as a collective capacity: fragile, interdependent, and shared. What is at stake is not only the right of individuals to remain, but the ability of a society to keep imagining itself through the contributions of many.

Photography by Bracket Studio (Anwyn Howarth) LINK

Participants:
Hsin Min Chan, Anwyn Howarth, Pete Fung, Metincan Guzel, Basak Tuna, Marija Mitic, Daniel Elkayam, Phoebe Zoe Ho, Alice Wan, George Baida, Ramón Jiménez Cárdenas, Shun Chih Chang, Seung Hwan Ji, Walter Mingledorff, Bruno Baietto, Leidy Karina Gómez Montoya, Kaan Hicyilmaz, Mira Ying, Carolina Perez Moreno, HaYoung Kim, Mal Yu, Shin Hua, Nishiko, Chiao Hsu, Qiao Chu Guo & Jing He, Yu-Fei Gao, Ishtar Hsu, Yulin Yao, Phoebe Hotopf, Yuky K, David Hernandez, Jaskarn Singh Hanspal, Ege Yılmaztürk.
Rotterdam, NL