KunstRAI x Rietveld Alumni 
paralelepípedo: about paradoxical dreams, bodies and imaginaries 

The Gerrit Rietveld Academie is invited by KunstRAI to curate a part of their exhibition floor with Rietveld alumni (graduates from 2023, 2024 and 2025). The result of this invitation will be the exhibition 'KunstRAI x Rietveld Alumni - paralelepípedo: about paradoxical dreams, bodies and imaginaries', taking place from 22 until 26 April 2026. On Friday 24 April, an Artist Night will take place, featuring a programme of performances, readings, and live presentations across multiple stages.

KunstRAI is an art fair where around 100 galleries will exhibit and sell works from artists across the Netherlands and abroad. The fair is also an opportunity for alumni to sell and showcase their work. Our exhibition's intention is to cultivate a dialogue with the fair visitors and our multidisciplinary, pluricultural and experimental approach to art education and culture.

More info on the KunstRAI and tickets here.

Life After on tour @KunstRAI 2026

Together with a group of Rietveld and Sandberg alums and students we’ll visit and talk with several galeries at the KunstRAI 2026.

When: Friday 24 April

15.00 – 16.30 Life After on tour

17.00 – 21.00 The Artist Night

Where: RAI, Amsterdam (Hal 1, Europahal)

Free of charge for students and alums, the entrance tickets are arranged by the academy. Sign up here. Entrance tickets are send to you by email.

About the exhibition

The Europahal at the RAI is a space of passage, shaped by the history of trade and exchange – yet its prosperity still rests on unseen exploitation. Rather than taking for granted where we are or who occupies the space with us, we approach it as a shared yet uneven ground. Is there a lack of mutuality? Is there a lack of neutrality? That is the paradox that appears and requires reorientation. On this fairground, the white cube as a concept is tilted and shifted sideways, displaced to make room for an encounter with a community of Amsterdam-based artists. 

The white cube is a spatial dimension that allows different bodies and voices to enter a territory. Although it may seem rigid in its construction, material, and color, we must loosen up its fixed form to break open this paradox. How to amplify this idea of an art fair as a paradox? The white cube can be tilted and make the viewer’s perception tilt too.   

This exhibition departs from the intuition that any attempt to tilt our perspectives of the world through art is fragmentary, fragile, fleeting, crooked, linear, askew. Our proposition of a white cube is a temporal paradox that will be conjured in the Europahal for just a few days until it disappears. The white cube becomes as imaginary as the works inside, and so will the passing bodies of visitors. When the activation of the artwork is temporal. How to treasure its first impression, as it leaves the fairgrounds and finds another habitat. Who activates the artwork: the spectator, the curator, or the artist? How are the roles embodied and who takes care of their afterlife. 

To acquire an artwork is to enter an exchange: not just of ownership, but of responsibility for its living and intuitive value. What does it mean to hold that charge? We wonder: what will become of these works? Their future unfolds as a territory in permanent interrogation, shaped by the context, encounters, and circulation that are set into motion by a possible new owner of the work. 

paralelepípedo is a collaborative exhibition with the Rietveld alums. Their works critically recuperate and reinterpret fragments of their own different cultural histories by scrutinizing fixed meanings.  

By doing so, they invite you to associate, to imagine, to speculate, to remain open in constant dialogue. The artists graduated from the Gerrit Rietveld Academie embody an interdisciplinary, experimental, critical, sensitive, and activist identity that continuously fabulates ways to provoke the assumed and associative meaning of the white cube's 'stuckness'.  

Curated by Jimena Casas and Mariken Overdijk, this exhibition positions the Rietveld Academie alums' plural practices. 

Participating artists are:   

Anna Leoni Klas, Clara Aramburo, Elle van Baaren, Ethan Lieutet Khnafo, Jonghwan Jeong, Karolina Hyun Wilting, Lana Bolkvadze, Laura Eager, Lawil Karama, Marie Willfort, Matthew Oxley, Maud Talma, Max van Meeuwen, Melody Raven, Mingrui Jiang, Nelli Molfenter, Pluk Robinson van Herwijnen, Rosa Shepherd, ShuShu Sieberns, Sofie Santos, Sophia Jiaqi Xu, Vasilisa Ikryannikova and Wenzhu Song. 

Programme Artist Night - Friday 24 April, 17:00 - 21:00

On Friday 24 April, an Artist Night will take place at the KunstRAI, featuring a programme of performances, readings, and live presentations across multiple stages. Some of our artists will also join this event, find our programme below.

All day long: Nelli Molfenter – I Will Now: Through My Own Actions, Act!

You enter a mid-sized room. You are allowed to take a seat, you take a seat. As you sit there you think: They know what I don’t. They have what I need. They take what I have, and what I have, is what they cure. They do what they can do. They do what they need to do. They do their best— and if they cannot, I would let them do as they please.

17.30: Wenzhu Song & Yunji Song – Ik ben een brood

A collaborative performance that explores the emotional and physical labour behind hospitality work. Drawing from our shared experiences as Asian waitresses in Amsterdam, we appear in bread costumes and sing an original song blending Dutch and English. Through humour and absurdity, the work reflects on the double identity of being both artists and a waitresses, and of living as international workers in the Netherlands. By embodying the “bread,” a symbol of both sustenance and labour, we question how creative and service work intertwine, and how we reclaim power by mocking the capitalist working system that shapes our daily lives.

18.00: Intro by Jimena and Mariken

18.45: Ethan Lieutet Khnafo – The Safe Is In My Slot

Playing on the positive association of good fortune and abundance allocated to the pig, this performance invites the audience to reroll their wealth in the slot of an almost human pork. Oinking in an uncanny space, far from its usual farm, this commonplace animal is a totem for money manifestation, as much as a critique of hierarchical currency. This sculptural performance places the object of the money bill at the center of its exchange with the viewer, celebrating the image of the strip-worker and sexiness.

19.00 & 20.00: Pluk Robinson van Herwijnen – Franklin's castle

Franklin's castle is all about reflecting on the relationship between women and cats, a symbiosis of nonverbal comfort and instinctive company. Exploring the beauty of the relationship between feline and human, through personal obsessions, my own experiences and shared ideologies. I use my practice to create alternate realities, to build evolving narratives around its characters. Aiming to achieve a bizarre visualisation of my personal desire of a world where the lines between pet ownership, friendship and interspecies hierarchy are blurred.

About the campaign 

In 1895 the first bike fair was held at the RAI (Rijwiel & Automobiel Industrie). 
In 2026 Maria is learning how to bike.  

Graphic design: Matthew Oxley 
Model: Maria Butnarasu