JURY Development Residencies 2026-27

Our open call for the 2026–27 residency programme has closed, and we are excited to share that we received an impressive 730 applications.

We are currently reviewing each submission with great care and preparing to select the next cohort of Jester residents. This year’s jury consists of Jo-Lene Ong, Laure Decock, Sjoerd Beijers, and Sarah Caillard, who will assess all applications in the coming weeks. The results will be announced by mid-March.

A sincere thank you to everyone who applied! We appreciate the trust you place in Jester.

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Jo-Lene Ong

Jo-Lene Ong is Curator of Buro Stedelijk, an independently managed, multidisciplinary and experimental platform within the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam.Her practice centres on collaboration, research and long-term projects that reconsider how institutions work with artists and audiences. She develops programmes that foreground shared authorship, sustained dialogue and public engagement. Ong was previously Curator at esea contemporary in Manchester and Program Advisor for the 12th Seoul Mediacity Biennale. Her curatorial work includes projects with the Hartwig Art Foundation, Framer Framed, the National Art Center Tokyo and the Mori Art Museum. From 2020 to 2024, Ong was a theory tutor at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie and is an alumna of the De Appel Curatorial Programme (2017–2018).

Photo by Bo Wang

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Laure Decock

Laure Decock is an independent curator and creative consultant. She studied history of Art at Ghent University and has worked in a commercial position at several contemporary art galleries such as Almine Rech Gallery, Albert Baronian, Axel Vervoordt and Meessen Declercq. With a group of fellow students she founded the S.M.A.K. young friends. She has worked on partnerships and events at WIELS and was a cultural advisor to the Dutch embassy in Belgium. Laure specializes in curatorial projects, advising cultural institutions on partnerships as well as the organization of contemporary art related hospitality events.

As a founding member of ELDERS Collectief in Kortrijk, she curated 'Alles Stroomt' and co-curated 'Corridor'. Together with Evelyn Simons she founded RendezVous - Brussels Art Week,an organisation celebrating the richness and variety of the contemporary Brussels art scene. This annual event takes place mid-September, and unites the city’s many contemporary art galleries to collectively celebrate the kick-off of the artistic season. Their first commissioned Salon de RendezVous was completed by Zoe Williams and hosted a discursive programme with talks and performances by Brussels based artists, curators and gallerists. 

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Sjoerd Beijers

Living in Maastricht, Sjoerd Beijers works across food, curatorial, and care practices. Their work explores counter-institutional infrastructures and considers how small, self-organised initiatives can challenge dominant cultural logics and redistribute agency. Central to this

practice is a rethinking of individual authorship, understood as tied to wider regimes of ownership that have contributed to the loss of the commons. From dinner performances to collective readings, Beijers creates decentralised gatherings where care functions as method. Recent initiatives include opening their home for a monthly “fugitive” dinner centred on mutual support and humanitarian fundraising, as well as coordinating Anti-class, an experimental residency and summer school dedicated to participant-led education and collective research.

Photo by Johan Poezevara

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Sarah Caillard

Sarah Caillard composes sensitive archives where the imprint—physical, psychic, and memorial—takes form: by casting bodies and postures, she confronts the sacred and the banal, ancient icons and viral personas. Fragmented and glitched, these bodies embody a haunting that moves through gestures and narratives; concrete, resin, and retroreflective fabrics heighten the tension between presence and disappearance. Between collective mythologies and intimate rituals, her works replay and subvert archetypes, producing figures that are at once familiar and spectral. Her practice—spanning sculpture, drawing, video, and installation—explores invisible transmissions, those that circulate across generations, images, and screens, and continue to shape our imaginaries.