The Van Abbemuseum announces the launch of System Thinkers, a new long-term institutional initiative which aims to embed artists directly within the museum’s governance, research, and civic technologies. Initiated under the leadership of director Defne Ayas, the program encapsulates the Van Abbemuseum’s commitment to positioning artists at the core of a new mode of institutional thinking.
Launching in June 2026, System Thinkers builds upon the institution’s long history of experimental curatorship, inviting a cohort of artists and collectives - including Ayoung Kim, john gerrard, Ayumi Paul, Kate Crawford, Vladen Joler, and ADEZIV network - to collaborate across the museum’s departments and the city partners to create a model of artist-led, forward-looking museology. Over the course of their two-year tenure, the System Thinkers will produce a body of transformative work across multiple formats and scales - ranging from solo presentations and public forums to scores, games, and live performances that occur within and beyond the museum walls. These will unfold both in and around the Van Abbemuseum’s site, as well as in meta-spaces such as its existing house choir, extending into the technological infrastructures of the city and the broader urban and ecological fabric of Eindhoven.
Working across these interconnected contexts, the System Thinkers aim to reshape both the internal life of the museum and its relationship with its users. This framework positions artistic practice as a sustained, embedded mode of inquiry within the institution’s evolving civic and cultural role. Coinciding with the reopening of the Van Abbemuseum collection, redesign of its ground floor building Dommelplein - a new, seven-gallery space - the first intervention by the System Thinkers sees artists john gerrard, Ayoung Kim and ADEZIV network explore these spaces with a series of solo exhibitions.
Ayoung Kim’s expansive artistic universe brings a speculative dimension to the Van Abbemuseum's pursuit of museological futures. She will open her first solo exhibition Delivery Dancer: Time Curves on 6 June 2026, followed by a newly commissioned game score for the city of Eindhoven premiering in October 2026 during Dutch Design Week.
john gerrard lends his sensitivity to histories of energy production. He presents Ghost Feed for Dommelplein, and will convene a knowledge-exchange gathering on 24 September 2026 around his work Sounding Board, in collaboration with Nieuw Zwanenburg fieldlab, a field-based research initiative exploring regenerative land practices, circular resource systems, and cross-disciplinary knowledge exchange between ecology, technology, and culture.
Ayumi Paul’s ritual and performance practice, rooted in song, connects to the museum’s site, the Dommel River. She will rehearse monthly with the museum's choir, working towards transforming a gallery into a singing base in October 2026. She focuses on the voice as a means of embodiment, collaborating with the choir and audiences.
Kate Crawford and Vladan Joler, artists and leading scholars of artificial intelligence, have been invited to think through the region's transforming relationship to AI. The Van Abbemuseum is co-commissioning their first film, Metabolic Machines.
ADEZIV is an Eindhoven-based network dedicated to neuro-inclusion and neuro-liberation. They are advising on accessibility across the museum while developing an experiential installation, Rest is Work, opening in October 2026. Their contribution also focuses on integrating STIM tools and related elements to advance the museum’s transition into a truly multi-sensory environment.
“We seek to work more closely with artists, bringing artistic intelligence into the museum’s core structures and shaping how we govern, collaborate, and imagine the next decade. These artists operate with ethical versatility, moving between ancestral knowledge and future technologies, whether through game engines, voice or other embodied practices, while maintaining a critical awareness of the present. At a time of massive mobilisation of data intelligence, alongside visible and invisible war urgencies across land, sea, and sky, museums like ours must move beyond static presentation models.” - Director of the Van Abbemuseum, Defne Ayas