Out in the Open - Group Exhibition

🏳️‍🌈 Proud to Be Part of Pride Art Route 2025

The artists a-re proud (and queerer than ever) to join forces with Pride Art Route this year!
From July 22nd to August 3rd, our pavilion at Treehouse NDSM will be part of a city-wide celebration of queer creativity, identity and expression.

🕒 The exhibition is open every day from 13:00 to 18:00, with additional evening openings during special events and workshops. In our next blog post, you’ll find the full program of side activities — including performances, experimental dinners, creative sessions and more.

Meet the amazing artists taking part in this exhibition. Each of them brings a unique perspective on queerness, fluidity, resistance, and joy: come visit, be curious, bring your friends, and let yourself be transformed. Treehouse is ready to be proudly "Out in the Open"...

Babet Klaassen is a queer fashion designer, textile artist and photographer from Amsterdam.

UNDEAD is an ongoing project that reimagines queers of Amsterdam as creatures of the night. Babet combines textile art, fashion, and photography to turn the community into ghosts, vampires, and other nocturnal beings. What if pride is not always about aligning ourselves with the mainstream, but instead about embracing our position as the outsider? What if we take pride in being the monster?

Rika Maja Duevel is a painter and mixed media artist from Stavanger, Norway, currently residing in Amsterdam. A global nomad, her ever-changing life is at the core of her art. Each new adventure brings fresh inspiration, and her work emerges from daily experiences, capturing moments and telling personal stories.

In this exhibition, Rika invites visitors to reflect on their own journey of growth and identity. The pieces, including two smaller works designed to be worn, symbolize the building of a personal shield, a talisman that offers protection along life’s winding paths. As an ally, Rika offers support and friendship, guiding each individual to craft their own symbolic armor and share their unique tales.

Marcela Perrusquia is a visual artist and educator originally from Mexico. Her art is deeply rooted in her personal and social experiences within the LGBTQ+ community, serving as a tribute to its resilience and strength. Through her work, Marcela tells stories of courage, growth, and mutual support in solidarity despite adversity.

La resistencia de las Flores, one of her most significant pieces, explores nature’s inherent will to endure: how flowers push through even the hardest and most unwelcoming ground. This powerful metaphor represents the strength and resilience of individuals and communities who thrive and support each other through all conditions and histories.

Gabriele Bonomi is a multidisciplinary artist and sustainable chef based in Amsterdam. Through Vegan Bear Lab, Gabriele combines artistic experimentation with a deep commitment to food as a tool for connection, care, and transformation. His work often explores identity, community, and sustainability, merging materials, media, and flavors to tell layered stories of belonging and self-expression.

For this exhibition, Gabriele presents a series of mixed-media works. The central piece, a pop-vintage triptych, invites reflection on queer identity, imagination, and self-acceptance.

Vico Persson is a visual artist whose practice includes sculpture, collage, and painting. Working primarily with recycled and discarded materials, such as food wrappers, plastics, metal, wood, clay, and paint. Vico reclaims what has been cast aside and reshapes it into abstract forms that speak of resilience, care, and transformation. His work moves intuitively, guided by a deep sensitivity to material and meaning, and often explores themes of queerness, vulnerability, and the quiet power of reinvention.

For this exhibition, he presents Freed From Desire, a curtain-like collage made from candy wrappers. Shimmering and soft, the piece evokes fleeting comfort, queer longing, and the ache of what’s missing. Inspired by Félix González-Torres, it reflects on desire, vulnerability, and the beauty of what remains.

Helga van Stralen is a visual artist based in Amsterdam, known for her poetic approach to form, material, and narrative. Trained in sculpture at the Royal Academy in The Hague and the Rijksakademie, she works across collage, clay, assemblage, and installation, combining found images, everyday objects, and hand-molded elements to create layered, intuitive compositions that speak of fragility, wonder, and the unexpected.

Helga approaches both art and life with a deep sense of humanity, seeing each person beyond categories of gender or identity. Her work carries a quiet but unmistakable queer sensibility: one that embraces ambiguity, tenderness, and the freedom to create new meanings outside of rigid norms. For this exhibition, her specific contribution remains a surprise, but her distinctive voice will no doubt invite us to see the world with new eyes.

Bruna Souza is a multidisciplinary artist working at the crossroads of identity, memory, and perception. With a background in visual arts and design, her practice spans sculpture, illustration, and participatory installations that invite viewers into playful yet introspective encounters with the self.

In Disco Squigglies (anything you want it to be), Bruna presents a series of vibrant mixed-media sculptures made of PU foam, acrylic, and mirror tiles. These abstract forms suggest bodies in flux: fragile, imperfect, and radiant. The mirrored surfaces reflect fragments of the viewer’s own image, shifting with perspective and mood. Inspired by disco aesthetics and personal transformation, the work becomes a quiet manifesto on queerness as multiplicity: always becoming, always refracted through others’ gaze. It is both joyful and uncertain, a dance between visibility and ambiguity.

Lies Aris is a visual artist and writer whose practice moves fluidly across media to explore narrative, context, and transformation. Rooted in everyday surrealism, her work asks: what happens when you strip a story of its setting? How does material shape meaning? What emerges when softness replaces structure?

In her recent pieces, Lies works primarily with delicate, intimate materials like wool, cotton, thread, pantyhose, crafting sculptures, collages and installations that blur the lines between object and narrative. These tactile works evoke bodily presence and emotional nuance, challenging the rigidity of dominant systems through gestures of tenderness. By dismantling patriarchal aesthetics and embracing softness as strength, her art becomes both a quiet protest and a poetic offering. "My work is a plea for a softer, more humane world and a break with patriarchal old systems.”

Fanny Karaman is a lingerie designer and educator whose brand, Rue du Paradis, celebrates radical self-love through bespoke, high-end pieces and inclusive workshops. With roots in France, Turkey and Germany, and now based in Amsterdam, Fanny brings her multicultural perspective and commitment to beauty beyond norms into every creation. Her work centers on softness, sensuality and the body as a sacred, diverse landscape.

For this installation, Fanny works with a lingerie mannequin that merges traditionally gendered forms: a female figure wearing a strap-on, dressed in delicate French lace. The piece is an ode to the beauty of trans bodies: soft, strong, and worthy of celebration. In this quiet gesture of adornment, she honors fluidity, identity and the right of all bodies to be seen as beautiful. "Everybody is beautiful, and love is everywhere."

Yung-Tuan is a percussionist, performer, and maker who transforms sound into playful, intuitive storytelling. Blending instruments, objects, and imagination, she creates sonic experiences that invite joy, curiosity, and connection.

For this installation, Yung-Tuan offers a gentle, exploratory sound space where visitors are invited to interact freely with a curated selection of melodic percussion instruments. The setup encourages spontaneous expression, shared discovery, and a sense of presence through touch and tone. Rooted in care and accessibility, the work is a celebration of softness, connection, and authentic queer joy, creating a safe space where sound becomes a shared language.

Norbert van Jong is a Dutch visual artist whose practice centers around expressive, figurative painting. With bold use of color and intuitive forms, his work explores the emotional range of human experience, often focusing on themes of vulnerability, introspection, and transformation. Each canvas is a moment suspended between reality and imagination, where identity is fluid and feeling takes shape.

Norbert presents a selection of acrylic paintings that reflect on self-image, wonder, and queer community. Through dreamlike figures and vivid compositions, his work offers space for soft emotions, reflection, and freedom beyond definition. His images speak to the beauty of being in-between, unresolved, emerging, and real.

Hans Talsma is a Dutch visual artist whose work explores moments of transition, reflection, and quiet emotional intensity. With a background in fine arts and art history, he paints figurative scenes in oil on canvas that hold a sense of stillness and suspense, capturing the silence between presence and absence, movement and pause.

Hans presents a selection of paintings that evoke themes of departure, control, and open space. Whether portraying a conductor gesturing toward unseen sound, a farewell that lingers unresolved, or a solitary field, his work offers space to reflect on identity as something fragile, evolving, and often unspoken. Each canvas becomes a meditative threshold between the seen and the felt.

Exhibited in the Treehouse Display - Outside the Pavilion, main parking side, Open 24/7 from July 7th to August 10th

Guido J. Hoek is a composer, multi-instrumentalist, performer and visual maker whose eclectic practice weaves together music, storytelling and found-object aesthetics. Working across disciplines, from singing and acting to installation and video, he creates emotionally charged, hybrid experiences that blur the line between stage and memory.

In Since You Asked, Guido presents a video installation where layered vocals and lo-fi visuals evoke vulnerability, longing, and the quiet drama of being heard. The piece is intimate and raw, set against a backdrop of recontextualized objects: old radios, dusty blinds, CRT televisions, each carrying their own quiet history. By inviting the audience to download the track, the work becomes portable, turning private resonance into a shared echo. Guido draws from a wide sonic palette: alternative, electronic, glam rock, hip-hop, funk, always searching for beauty in chaos and the unfinished.

Exhibited at International Theatre of Amsterdam - Bookshop (Leidseplein - Amsterdam)

Quintus Glerum is a media artist working at the intersection of identity, play, and technology. With a background in animation and media arts, his work explores how humans mirror themselves in machines, simplifying complex emotions into symbolic, often humorous forms.

In Simulacra of Self, Quintus uses a joystick to control a colorful mass of synthetic hair that conceals a simulated face. The interaction teases revelation but never fully delivers it, evoking childhood, performance, and the elusive nature of identity. Drawing from video game culture and Baudrillard’s theory of the “copy without original,” the piece becomes a meditation on queerness, visibility, and the longing to be both seen and undefined.

This exhibition is made possible by
🌱 Treehouse NDSM, in collaboration with 🏳️‍🌈 Pride Art Route.

Curated by: Bonomi Gabriele
Assistant curator & coaching: Rika Maja Duevel