Artist talk: Nieuw Celebrities
On Thursday, August 6th at 18:00, Van Eesteren, Karmel Sabri will be giving an artist talk about her ongoing work titled "Nieuw Celebrities," followed by a conversation with Saja Amro & Hamza Badran, two Palestinian artists living and working in Amsterdam. Karmel will share her research and method behind this work, while Saja and Hamza speak to parallel themes of displacement, colonial violence, settler and occupational separation, and masculinity, drawing on their own experience working between Palestine and Europe.
Hamza Badran was born in Nablus and raised in Ramallah, Palestine. He is a writer and visual artist working between Basel and Amsterdam. He is currently an artist-in-residence at the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten in Amsterdam and is the recipient of the Swiss Art Award for his work titled Freedom Molasses (2026).
Saja Amro, from Dura, Palestine, is an architect, educator, and designer based between the Netherlands and Palestine, and a co-founder of the Spatial Justice for Palestine Network. Her work focuses on how art, design, and spatial practice can be used as political tools in situations of revolution and oppression, exploring how space can enable or suppress freedom and justice. Saja teaches at the architecture department at the Rietveld Academy, as well as at the Academie van Bouwkunst.
About Nieuw Celebrities:
Through social investigations, Karmel has identified real Palestinian boys living and playing football in various cities in Palestine and rendered their likenesses into larger-than-life inflatable sculptures, which will be installed in the outdoor space of the Van Eesteren Museum for the evening of this event, monumental in scale, immediate in presence, and deliberately provocative in material. The inflatable carries a specific history: military decoys engineered to simulate targets, to attract fire, to absorb threat in place of something real. Sabri takes this object and extends its protective logic.
The military decoy absorbs the threat in Amsterdam as a symbolic act of protection for children playing football in Palestine. In the same vein, the sculpture demands the visibility and safety of a real child. Palestinian boys are killed at a rate unmatched by any other group of children in the world, and with ongoing escalations of settler violence, this right is continuously threatened.
This event is free of entrance. If you will be our guest, we kindly ask to RSVP via the button below.
