Shimmer, Eloise Sweetman & Jason Hendrik Hansma

Shimmer is a curatorial studio located in a former public transport building at the edge of the Port of Rotterdam, positioned between oil-riggers and wind-turbine installing ships. This contradiction, sunsets born of pollution, structures our adaptive outlook on art making and curatorial discourse. We operate as both studio and exhibition space, merging artistic and administrative practice into a 40 m² space. This intimacy fosters experimentation, curatorial responsiveness, and proximity to high-quality artistic work.

Founded in 2018 by Eloise Sweetman and Jason Hendrik Hansma, Shimmer has evolved into a hybrid cultural platform working across exhibitions, publishing, pedagogy, and institutional advising. We work in the space between micro-artist-run initiatives and larger institutional centres, allowing us to remain agile and rigorous, speculative yet structurally sound.

Our approach is shaped by recursive governance: a model of institutional reflection where learning from artworks, audiences, and collaborators is folded back into our methods. We do not separate artistic production from curatorial thinking, nor public programming from internal ethics. Instead, we build Shimmer as an organisation where artworks, people, and structures co-learn together over time.

We have presented works by over 150 artists and practitioners, including Bik van der Pol, Florence Bonnefous, Marcel Duchamp, Willem de Rooij, Theo van Doesburg, Ellen Gallagher, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Joseph Grigely, Ian Kiaer, Mike Kelley, Lee Kit, Liz Magor, Marina Otero Verzier, Charlotte Posenenske, Francois Piron, Anne Tallentire, and Lawrence Weiner, among others.

The Water is Wide*

Shimmer curates like water—it is not static and is always in motion. We see the exhibition as a studio, in which the artworks, materials and temporalities relate to one another and therefore enable ideas, histories, and generations to overlap and intersect. Instead of viewing the exhibition as a fixed container of meaning, we let it unfold over time, breaking across conceptual, spatial, and temporal boundaries. As a result, Shimmer’s exhibitions become a means of generating curatorial and artistic knowledge: the insights we gain from the artworks, the artists, and the audiences are then taken back to the studio where they influence our future work.

Our method is a response to the current situation characterised by major environmental, geopolitical, and technological changes. Since the conditions on which we understand each other are becoming increasingly unstable, we need ways of thinking that can bring together different kinds of knowledge and experience without reducing them to fixed categories. By curating, we aim to examine the past, help shape possible futures, and leave more space for the complexity of the present.

Instead of putting a history, a practice, an idea, or an audience into a specific category, we aim to keep these relationships open. For us, the act of curating is one of making room for unexpected alliances—between artworks, between generations, between different kinds of knowledge, and between them, and us as curators.

* The Water Is Wide (1965) in There You Go by Dorris Henderson & John Renbourn