This year, Conflux Festival returns to Katoenhuis with an exhibition programme. Once again, for four days, the festival will fill our spaces with video and sound installations, visual art, and multimedia sculptures exploring this year’s theme: Tactics for Cultural Resistance.

Works by Anne Wenzel, Yara Mekawei, Amrith de Zoete and Tools for Action, among others, will be on display. The remaining artists in the exhibition programme will be announced very soon.

The exhibition is free to attend and open from Thursday, September 24 to Sunday, September 27.

Opening times:

Thursday 24th: 20:00 – 23:00

Friday 25th: 14:00 – 20:00

Saturday 26th: 14:00 – 20:00

Sunday 27th: 12:00 – 20:00

Conflux Festival is a multidisciplinary art festival that takes place at various locations in Rotterdam. It consists of performances, an exhibition, a conference, a night program, and art in public space. For the past three years, the free exhibition at Katoenhuis has been a recurring feature.

You can find tickets for the rest of the program here. 

Participating artists

Amrith de Zoete

Amrith de Zoete uses industrial materials and techniques such as stainless steel, industrial plastics, pneumatics, and motors, while keeping them connected to their original environments. By using these materials, he suggests that the medium itself is the message, often referencing industrial production facilities.

These seemingly soulless yet lively devices and machines, as seen in factories, are built for speed and inhuman precision. They are responsible for the pristine products we consume. De Zoete aims to reveal this bleak, alienated, yet fearsome system that surrounds us, as it is part of us and defines modern life.

Anne Wenzel

Anne Wenzel works on a strong and distinctive oeuvre of monumental ceramic sculptures and installations that are often placed in an accurately orchestrated setting. Wenzel takes a more subversive position between tradition and modernity. Departing from historical iconography, she tackles contemporary and often political themes by using a consciously chosen traditional medium: clay. 

Out of a fascination for the language of heroism, she questions the manipulative force of nationalist architecture and sculpture. Investigating their formal language and history, Wenzel reinterprets the symbolic value by connecting it to current tendencies in political culture.

Tools for Action 

Tools for Action develops new forms of assembly and political action through participatory performances, open source skill-sharing workshops, and large-scale inflatable social sculptures. Monumental yet fragile, playful yet confrontational, these inflatable tools become mobile barricades, swarms, and tactical media interventions through choreographed direct-action training. Working across climate justice, anti-fascism, memory culture, and queer and trans* visibility, the collective creates spaces for resistance, solidarity, and collective imagination.

Founded in Berlin in 2012 and emerging from the former Eclectic Electric Collective, Tools for Action has worked internationally in shifting constellations of artists and activists. Since 2019, the collective has operated from Rotterdam through the Tools for Action Foundation. Core collaborators have included Bambi Benkö (formerly Artúr van Balen), Katherine Ball, Jakub Simcik, Tilly Gifford, Sarah Drain, Pascal Espinosa, and Shailoh Phillips.

Yara Mekawei

Sonic sculptor, composer and scholar Yara Mekawei operates at the threshold, where urban pulse meets mythic echo, where Coptic breath and the Book of The Dead converge with algorithmic code. Ancient texts and scriptures are her music composition source.

She transmutes the ambient rhythms of cities, the liturgical whispers of Sufi antiquity, and the poetic geometries of esoteric texts into immersive divin-sonic architectures that dissolve borders between history and identity.

The auditory alchemy; a synesthetic ritual that turns sound into space, silence into structure. A chant’s glory, a kinetic installation. Breath, mapped as collective memory. This is transubstantiation, not translation. For Mekawei, sound is vessel, voyage, and verb: carrying ancestral wisdom, threading temporal layers, speaking across sensorial divides.

Zoro Feigl 

For Conflux festival 2026, Zoro Feigl builds upon his earlier work where he takes simple movements into repetition and elegance. His sculptural elements seems to be found in nature, discovered instead of made. Where their movement departs from the natural their rhythms become discomforting. Our perception of reality might be fooled while the edge between the real and fake is challenged.

This work is commissioned by Conflux festival.