On Saturday June 13, 2026 we open a very special artproject of our Charlois' neighbours: the artistduo Gil & Moti

On June 21, 2001, Gil & Moti were the first couple in Rotterdam to take advantage of the new law that made marriage possible for same-sex couples. At the time, Gil & Moti turned their wedding into an art project: they performed a staged wedding ceremony led by then-Mayor Opstelten on the balcony of Rotterdam City Hall. It was a city event to which everyone was invited. Additionally, they stayed in the foyer of Rotterdam City Hall for ten days to engage in conversation with visitors and residents about this historic change in the law.

Twenty-five years later, Gil & Moti return to the public space and take to the streets once again to interview Rotterdammers about themes such as love, diversity, freedom, and the position of the LGBTQIA+ community. The exhibition brings past and present together and shows how societal views have evolved over a quarter of a century. The exhibition features new and never-before-seen work, alongside existing work including the wedding video from that time, a collaboration with Marieke van der Lippe, and paintings, drawings, and collages created for the project 25 years ago.

         

Gil & Moti Wedding Project – Protect, 2001–2026 is a project exhibition in which art, personal history, and societal dialogue converge. The project invites visitors to reflect on the meaning of acquired rights, visibility, and inclusion in a time when these themes are once again the subject of public debate.

The new film will premiere during the opening. In addition to street interviews, Mayor Carola Schouten and former Mayor Ivo Opsteltenwho officiated Gil & Moti's wedding in 2001, also speak in this film. Opstelten will also open this anniversary exhibition. This establishes a symbolic connection between the historical moment of the past and the current reflection of today.

     

About Gil & Moti

Gil & Moti have been an internationally operating artist duo since 1994. Their work operates at the intersection of art, identity, migration, love, and social engagement. From their home and workplace in Rotterdam Oud-Charlois, they realize projects in which encounter, participation, and societal issues take center stage.

Opening:                   Saturday, June 13, 18:00 – 20:00
in the presence of former Mayor Ivo Opstelten, with whom artists will engage in conversation.

Location:                     Nieuw Charlois – Platform voor Kunst & Design, Huismanstraat 30, 3082 HK Rotterdam

Period:                    June 13 – July 4, 2026

Open:                         Thursday to Saturday, 10:00 – 17:00, or by appointment + June 27 and 28 during South Explorer

(http://southexplorer.nl)

 

Warm greetings, Team Nieuw Charlois

We would like to invite you to attend the opening of the new exhibition in Nieuw Charlois on saturday 9 may, 18.00 – 20.00 hours . The opening will be performed by Esmee Postma, reviewer of modern and contemporary visual art for De Volkskrant. She reviews exhibitions, profiles artists, and identifies trends within the arts. Additionally, she writes for various art magazines and serves as a publications editor at Museum Booijmans van Beuningen Rotterdam. She will talk with the two artists about the works in the show.

Céline van den Boorn paints over the people in the images she uses. They literally disappear from the frame and are absorbed into the surrounding landscape, which suddenly takes center stage. Olphaert den Otter does not even paint the people. In his work, only the landscapes remain, which do bear the traces of what people have done there. Both artists take current images from the news as their starting point. The usually unsettling subject, with the human as the protagonist, disappears in their paintings through their intervention, while traces of human presence remain subtly visible.

Strangely enough, the absence of people does not make the works empty. On the contrary, the very absence leads to an intuitive search by the viewer. And this search raises questions. What is not visible makes the works more complex and layered. The viewer has a task: to take a stand, to empathize, to fill in the blanks, perhaps even: self-examination.

Celine van den Boorn (1978, graduated from the Hogeschool voor de Kunsten Utrecht) works in Amsterdam and is a lecturer at the HKU. Her work is held in various museum- and corporate collections, such as Fenix, Kunstmuseum Den Haag, Fries Museum, the Ministerie van Buitenlandse Zaken, and NAVO Brussels.

Olphaert den Otter (1955, graduated from the Willem de Kooning Academie) works with egg tempera, often in large series. One of these, the ‘Stal- en Kluis- morfologieserie’ comprising 127 works, was shown in 2008 at Museum Boijmans van Beuningen Rotterdam. Parts of the extensive ‘World Stress Painting’ series have been shown in numerous locations, both domestically and abroad. In 2016, Museum Boijmans van Beuningen acquired his ‘Tondo Mondo’ work, a large painting with a detailed depiction of our planet. In 2020, Museum Belvédère Heereveen presented a major retrospective, ‘Earth and World’.

Opening: saturday 9 May, 18.00 – 20.00 hours
food and drinks will be served.
Open: 9 May – 6 June, Thu. – Sat. 10.00 – 17.00 hours

Warm greetings, Team Nieuw Charlois

From our own Oud-Charlois we proudly present Barbara Helmer.

On Friday April 10, 2026 the doors are open to welcome you for the opening of new works by painter Barbara Helmer: What Time is Love. Barbara Helmer's abstract paintings are about the surface of materials and the play of light on specific materials. For example, the play of light and reflection on metal, or a certain brightness created by light. Sometimes they involve gradually flowing colors, where the texture of the paint appears soft and the image becomes blurred. A sense of depth emerges. Or do you encounter the surface? The work is a division or composition of parts or fragments, the small particles and the great whole. Barbara Helmer loves the effect of paint. At one time she uses figurative elements and different worlds come together; at another, they exist side by side.

               

Siebe Thissen, historian, philosopher, writer, and former head of BKOR (CBK Rotterdam), will open the exhibition with a reflection on the work of Barbara Helmer. We hope to welcome you.

Opening: Friday, April 10, 2026, 6:00 PM – 8:00 PM.

The opening will be performed by Siebe Thissen.

Open: 10 April – 2 May 2026, Thu to Sat 10:00 – 17:00.

C 3-Studios, Huismanstraat 30, 3082 HK Rotterdam

 

Insta: barbarahelmer_art

 

Warm regards, team Nieuw charlois

 

We cordially invite you to our new show during Rotterdam Art Week:
JumpstArt Foundation presents five artists connected to their platform:, Frida Berntsen, Kasper Boelens, Wille-Meike Brand, Kasper van Moll and Joost Vermeer.

About JumpstArt:
JumpstArt is a dynamic non-profit platform that supports visual artists in building an independent and enduring professional practice, especially in the early stages of their careers. They work in a hybrid way and are flexible in location: exhibitions, events and artist talks take place in inspiring places.

The exhibition "ECHO HOLD” explores how traces of memory and lived experience can be transformed into material. Objects, textiles, names and fragments from the past are reimagined. What persists becomes the starting point for new forms, uncovering history, inheritance and memory.

Groupshow "ECHO HOLD" with works of the artists:
Frids Berntsen – Kasper Boelens – Wille-Meike Brand – Kasper van Moll – Joost Vermeer
Curator: Iris Cornelis.
Opening: Saturday, 21th of March 2026, 18.00 – 20.00 hours, by Iris Cornelis
Open: 20th -21th of March and 26th – 29th of March, 10.00 – 17.00 hours.

Event:
Saturday, 28th of March | 14:00 – 18:30 hours.

JumpstArt organises a panel talk, in collaboration with our European partners Club 707 (Paris) and Backhaus Projects (Berlin).

These panels explore creative independence, peer-to-peer community building and access to cultural rights, featuring artists, curators and cultural professionals from across Europe.

Moderator: Sophie Mak Schram
Speakers: La Buse collective (FR) – Jacquill G. Basdew (NL) – Edward Clydesdale Thomson (NL) – Nanda Janssen (NL) – Joep van Lieshout (NL) – Het Wilde Weten / Esther Kokmeijer (NL) – Katarzyna Nowak (DE) – Isabelle Wachsmuth (CH) – TransArtists (NL)
This program is part of Permission to Try (PTT), funded by Erasmus+ Program initiative enhancing professional opportunities for independent artists.

Free event – book your free ticket to reserve your place.

https://www.eventbrite.nl/e/permission-to-talk-panel-talks-tickets-1984476199734?aff=oddtdtcreator
or send an email to iris@jumpstartspace.com

Warm regards, team Nieuw charlois

Groupshow “IfParadiseIsHalfAsNice”

Opening: 20 February 5:30 PM – 9:00 PM
Open: 20 Februari – 1 March, thur – sun. 10:00 AM - 5:00 PM

For 15 editions already IPIHAN organizes a five-week work period at abandoned industrial sites in Europe. A group of artists lives and works on-site on site-specific installations, always using the building and its surroundings as their starting point.
During the last weekend of those five weeks, IPIHAN traditionally opens its doors to the public: not only to view the works, but also to experience what life was like there for five weeks.

If Paradise is Half as Nice presents an overview of 15 IPIHAN editions in Nieuw Charlois, including:
An IPIHAN-style bar and merchandise shop
A photo archive of all 15 editions
The documentary of edition #15, made by Tine Mazgon
Documentaries from past years
The multiples from the crowdfunding boxes
All IPIHAN T-shirts, postcards, and other IPIHAN merchandise
And many of the IPIHAN multiples from past years are available for purchase separately!

IPIHAN's funding comes largely from its loyal crowdfunders!
Every year, they receive a reward in the form of multiples created by participating artists. This year, the crowdfunders of edition #15 are no exception.
In addition, many multiples from past editions are now available for purchase in Nieuw Charlois.
So grab this opportunity to support IPIHAN and still acquire a work by your favorite IPIHAN artist.

https://ifparadiseishalfasnice.com/
https://www.facebook.com/ifparadiseishalfasnice
https://www.instagram.com/ipihan_the_project/

Participating artists:

Esther Kokmeijer
Pim Palsgraaf
Regina Kelaita
Guus Vreeburg
Anne Roos van Veen
Willem Besselink
Judy van Luyk
Maurice Bogaert
Marusa Stibelj
Lieve van den Bijgaart

Warm regards, team Nieuw charlois

group show "Thinking in Textile"

Thinking in Textile is an exhibition proposing that textiles carry forms of intelligence revealed through touch and sensation, making intangible worlds tangible through material encounter. It brings together eight artists who work with fibre and cloth as sites where memory, identity, meaning and resistance take form. The works converge on a shared idea: textile is a medium for thinking through life, as our inner worlds and the fibres we touch are always entangled.

Jenny Konrad presents a weighted quilt filled with glass beads and memory foam, inviting touch and physical sensation to communicate the experience of autistic shutdown. Fenna van Breda uses her handmade loom to frame the motions of cleaning, revealing the back of her weavings to show that the movements shaping our lives have no single direction or fixed reading, and that one small motion, as in life, shifts the whole, making sensorial memory a process she thinks through by doing.Sarah Roseman translates childhood memory into a hand-tufted carpet where recollection is encountered as texture and scale, while Iza van den Baar sculpts cloth into bread-like textile forms to probe how nostalgia and belonging are materially constructed.
Yoana Buzova uses embroidery to document forms of productivity that often go unrecognized, shaping inherited cloth into a stitched fort and an audio-visual piece that reflect the labor, time and skill built in private, domestic routines. Maga Berr stages an installation where Underground Railway quilt motifs carry the coded memory of collective liberation, while an embroidered letter invokes the contested origins of a popular wax-print textile company, drawing a parallel between distant textile histories shaped by inequality. Dakota Havard quilts into discarded cardboard, positioning overlooked materials as sites of resistance to disposability. Johana Molina Yokolina explores transformation and death rituals through a soft textile skeleton, proposing death as a moment of material transformation, rather than a finalised conclusion.

Across the works, textile communicates by being practiced and repurposed, as meaning forms through touch, rather than words or explanations.

The exhibition opens on Saterday January 17th from 18.00-20.00 hrs and runs until February 14th
Around 6:30PM the curator of the show, Tiiu Meiner, will guide a tour with the artists along their work!

Warm regards, team Nieuw charlois