The Netherlands
https://lunavanderstraaten.com/
@lunavanderstraaten
Residency period: January - March 2026
Residency granted by @amartefonds and Stichting Gerbrandy Cultuurfonds
Luna van der Straaten (2001, Amsterdam) explores the human desire to gain control over a fundamentally ungraspable world. Working with painting, printmaking, and drawing, she combines texts, photographs, and objects into layered, symbolic images.
Systems of knowledge such as religion, science, and metaphysics recur in her work as attempts to structure and fix the unknown. These systems exist in tension with what resists being captured: the unconscious, the chaotic, and the transient.
Nature, from the microscopic to the cosmic, plays a central role in this tension. Processes of transformation stand in contrast to the human impulse to hold on and control. Her working process mirrors this, moving between control and intuition through a collage-like approach of building and erasing layers, automatic drawing, and asemic writing.
Three Belgian and three Icelandic artists are taking part in a residency exchange, and on Friday the 27th and Saturday 28th February, they will have a group exhibition of those Belgian artists at SÍM Residency, Seljavegur.
The focus of their art-science project (https://www.sim-residency.info/event-details/sim-residency-samsyning-drift-tip-the-point-art-earth) is glaciers - landscapes that are visibly changing and disappearing.
Darren spoke to artist Kevin Trappeniers and curator Nicolas Baeyens on RÚV English Radio.
You are warmly invited to a group exhibition of Belgian artists at the SÍM artist residency, Seljavegur 32.
The exhibition is open Friday, February 27 from 17:00–20:00 and Saturday, February 28 from 13:00–15:00.
Curator: Nicolas Baeyens
Drift / Tip the Point is the first public work-in-progress presentation within a transdisciplinary trajectory by the Belgian artists Kevin Trappeniers, Mattias De Craene and Stijn Demeulenaere. During a residency at SÍM in Iceland, they explored how a landscape in transformation can function as a barometer of global climate shifts.
