Currents 12: Camping Out

For Currents #12: Camping Out, Maia Kenney and Berber Meindertsma envision a curatorial strategy that finds affinity with their experience of camping. A camping or art situation asks for a site-specific approach where you work with what is at hand, listening and responding to your environment and your own skills and needs. In their vision for the exhibition, together with the artists they find a temporary home at the site of Jester, working with its possibilities and idiosyncrasies. Artworks are adapted on site; specialized tools and strategies are developed and used to build the environment. Once the exhibition comes to life, the audience is invited to join the camp.  

During their visits to eleven graduation shows at art academies in the Meuse-Rhine Euregion over the summer of 2025, Kenney and Meindertsma began to see how different artists create their own autonomous zones amidst the chaos of the (art) world. They noticed how artists look through the smoke and create an environment where a future can be imagined. 

The nine selected artists each present their own way of camping out. Some of the artists have innate qualities of curiosity and adaptability; they have developed distinctive ways of relating to the world. Others have an eagerness to create community, allowing their work to develop through the way they interact and relate to human and more-than-human others. Their work marks out space for stories which are heard less often yet are lived by more people.

The Currents exhibition series creates moments of possibility for artists who are at the start of their professional careers. This year these moments began with the curatorial visits to graduation shows and continued with a three-day training programme hosted by Jester. During this ‘camp’ in October 2025, and leading up to the exhibition making process, the artists are invited to create an environment together in which to share their knowledge, experience and strategies with each other.  

The intention of Camping Out is to create a temporary autonomous zone at Jester which nurtures bonds that are sustained long after the show ends - and which the artists can lean on as they explore new grounds.