Launch of System Thinkers

Launching in June 2026 alongside the reopening of the Van Abbemuseum’s collection building, the museum announces System Thinkers, a long-term initiative that embeds artists directly within the museum’s thinking and operations. The inaugural cohort includes artists Ayoung Kim, john gerrard, Ayumi Paul, artists and scholars Kate Crawford and Vladan Joler, and the Eindhoven-based network ADEZIV. The museum will be working with them as long-term co-authors across institutional culture, public engagement, education, mediation, ritual, and civic imagination. The initiative marks a new chapter in the museum’s civic role in Eindhoven, responding to intersecting social, technological, and ecological conditions shaping the region.

Building on the institution’s longstanding history of experimental curatorship, System Thinkers extends the museum’s commitment to artists as contributors to how the institution functions, learns, and evolves. The programme unfolds at a moment of transition and renewal for the museum, as new teams are formed and the institution deepens its engagement with the city and its publics. Rather than positioning artists at the end of a commissioning process, the initiative invites them into the museum’s core structures and long-term thinking.

Across a two-year period, the artists will develop works across multiple formats - exhibitions, research trajectories, public forums, game scores, vocal compositions, accessibility interventions, and new civic learning models extending into Eindhoven’s infrastructures and lived environments.

The initiative situates artistic practice as an embedded form of institutional intelligence. Artists work closely with museum teams, volunteers, mediators, and local stakeholders, contributing to both internal operations and public-facing programming. The framework includes acquisitions, commissions, long-term residencies, and partnerships with regional organizations, including Design Academy Eindhoven.

The first interventions by john gerrard, Ayoung Kim, and ADEZIV are presented from June 6, 2026, spanning the newly configured reception areas at Dommelplein and a seven-gallery public zone on the museum’s ground floor. These launches coincide with the reopening of the collection display, Collection as Cosmos, organized around research threads shaped by artists-as-researchers, including the Johannesburg working group of Another Roadmap Africa Cluster (ARAC), artist and death researcher G, Ima-Abasi Okon, and Nolan Oswald Dennis.

System Thinkers Highlights

Ayoung Kim extends a speculative narrative practice through systems of logistics, mobility, and perception. Her solo exhibition Delivery Dancer: Time Curves opened on June 6, 2026, exploring cinematic and algorithmic worlds of movement and control. In October 2026, during Dutch Design Week, she will premiere a city-based analogue game score developed with students from Design Academy Eindhoven, culminating in a public conference with theorist Chanda Prescod-Weinstein.

john gerrard explores invisible infrastructures of energy, extraction, and environmental change through simulation-based works. His piece Ghost Feed, recently acquired by the museum, is installed at Dommelplein, foregrounding the material conditions of technological modernity. In October 2026, he convenes a knowledge exchange around Sounding Board, developed with Nieuw Zwanenburg Fieldlab, focusing on regenerative systems across ecology, technology, and land use in the Eindhoven region.

Ayumi Paul works with voice, listening, and ritual as civic tools. Since early 2026, she has been developing monthly rehearsals with the museum’s house choir, transforming it into a spatial and participatory practice. In October 2026, she will activate a gallery as a collective singing environment, bringing together Eindhoven’s choir communities in a shared acoustic and social space.

Kate Crawford and Vladan Joler examine artificial intelligence and planetary computation. The museum co-commissions their film Metabolic Machines, alongside a research trajectory into Eindhoven’s semiconductor, optical, and laser industries, mapping the environmental and social systems underpinning technological production.

ADEZIV develops accessibility and neuro-inclusive design interventions across the museum. Their work begins with sensory and spatial adaptations to the reception and locker areas through stim tools, and expands into Rest is Work, an installation opening in October 2026 that rethinks rest, care, and institutional sensory conditions.

System Thinkers in Eindhoven

As the museum reopens its collection building, System Thinkers positions the institution within Eindhoven’s broader industrial and ecological landscape, from its river systems and factory histories to its contemporary role in light, semiconductor, and AI industries. It foregrounds the museum as a site for attention, repair, and collective imagination under conditions of acceleration and psychic exhaustion.

Led by museum director Defne Ayas, whose practice has long centered on artistic commissions and experimental institutional models, the initiative builds on this trajectory by expanding it into a broader institutional framework that places artistic intelligence at the center of organizational thinking and public life. 

Ayas says: “As we undergo a rapid transition and build a new team, while forming a broader civic and celestial reorientation of the museum, I am confident System Thinkers will bring a form of intelligence into the museum’s core, grounding our work more deeply in the city and in our situated condition within it. At a time of psychic exhaustion, intensified data flows, and intersecting urgencies, we aim to create conditions for a museum that is both grounded and borderless in its thinking - attending to both individual and collective nervous systems, as a civic sanctuary for attention, repair, grief, ritual, and collective imagination - while remaining critically attuned to the visible and invisible forces shaping the present, and to our entanglement across land, sea, and sky.”

Credits: Directed by Defne Ayas, curatorial and mediation team: Abril Cisneros Ramírez, Yolande Zola Zoli van der Heide, Steven ten Thije, Maziar Afrassiabi, Vivian Vasilda Heyms, among others, with special thanks to the museum choir, the volunteers, choir conductor Willy de Rooij, and designer Leonne Cuppen.

Press enquiries
Millie O’Connor, millie@sam-talbot.com