Van Abbehuis is a house for contemporary art. It was built in 1919 by cigar manufacturer Henri Van Abbe. He and his family used to live in the house, across the street from the museum they founded. Over the years, Van Abbe accumulated works by artists he collected for both his home and the factory, which he since then donated to the museum and the municipality.
Since approximately 2021 the former house presents annually exhibitions, installations, residencies and performances, and functions as a space where contemporary art is approached through local infrastructures and reciprocal forms of authorship. The exhibitions and residencies in Van Abbehuis relate through the infrastructure of the rooms of the space that are based on their former residential function: a gallery space, a working office, a library, a cellar, a café, and a garden. On the top floors, studio’s of different artists are housed.

For Daily Lazy, we spoke with Fréderique Scholtes, director of Van Abbehuis, and Kimiya Jahanshahi, assistant curator, writer, and artist, about the institution’s evolving program.


 left assistant curator Kimiya Jahanshahi, right director and curator Fréderique Scholtes, cc Cisza de Buck

Irini Miga:
In what ways does the specificity of the house shape the curatorial and operational logic of Van Abbehuis?

Fréderique Scholtes: The specificity of a house, to be able to contextualize contemporary art in a domestic, residential setting, calls out to both of us. Its infrastructure is build up in a sort of rudimentary way, the influence on art here is in the realm of necessity outside of the context you’re working for. Since I was appointed director, we’ve housed exhibitions so far with artists like Ghislaine Leung, it is part of an ensemble, Mira Dayal, Olivier Goethals, Quay Quinn Wolf, Estéfana Román Mateszans, Tom Marioni, Johannes Equizi, Etienne Chambaud, but also inititives and institutes like electornic music platform Melting Pot Collective, the MuHKA, radio hosts from DVR Collective and radio WORM, dance collective Death Proof Project, feminist platform The Wave, hip hop and urban institute E-moves and TU/Eindhoven.

Van Abbehuis, Johannes Equizi, portal, 2025

IM:
Eindhoven has a strong industrial and design legacy shaped by actors like ASML (former Philips), high tech chip developer and Design Academy Eindhoven, adhering to upscaling and innovation. How does the environment of the city influence Van Abbehuis Foundation’s programming and partnerships?

FS: We sit across from the Van Abbemuseum; in the next years there are plans to build a Rijksmuseum; the first in the southern region of the Netherlands. Eindhoven is in a sense influenced by a sort of periphery context, growing fast in post-industrialisation and speaking the language of existence for the production of speculative values. It lost a few good independent spaces over the last years, like Stroomhuis and Apollohuis (the -huis appendix is accidental). Spaces often unconsciously inherit the grammar of the cities they inhabit, and our curatorial viewpoint sits orthogonal to accelerationism.

Mira Dayal Map 40°43’15.0″N 73°59’05.51″W, centraal museum negatives, 2025


Kimiya Jahanshahi: Our logic is based more on the idea of test-sites, provisional structures through developing long term relationships with counterculture in the city. We work with artists whose practices are mostly immaterial, social or conceptual. We connect them to local initiatives, substituting the institutional network with informal encounters with people who are implied in certain art contexts without necessarily having a direct relation to them yet.

Wonhyeongdeul, bureau parso, cake event in garden 2025 cc Nam Seung Rok

IM:
What is your long-term vision for the institution, and what curatorial priorities will define your first years?


KJ: Innate to our exhibitions, residencies, readings and radio shows we host happenings every Wednesday through the restaging of Tom Marioni’s 1975 Café Wednesday. For us its a non-occassional way of programming; the billiard room, the library, garden and exhibitions do not operate as isolated departments, but respond to each other. Someone can enter through a dance recital, return for a Swidzinski reading and ends up in a cassette tape performance. The works in Van Abbehuis exist somewhere in between—as a house where ideas travel, bodies reinterpret them, and audiences encounter them again under new conditions.

FS: It’s a call and response method, where artists host contradictions without prematurely resolving them. As a result, exhibitions can mutate mid-presentation, for example with next years show with Danielle Lemaire, in which participatory elements changes the setting of the space throughout its running time. Our priority is to build reciprocration that is unexpected, as Kimiya states, where artists and visitors formulate themselves in our cramped billiard room, producing social life before it gets hardened into cultural product.

A New Corner, Marijn van Kreij & Akiko Wakabayashi, library, 2026 cc Lucy Schreurs

IM:
In balancing local relevance with international reach, what does meaningful engagement actually look like for you in Eindhoven—who are you prioritizing, and what concrete steps will you take to involve underrepresented communities as active participants?


FS: ‘Communities’ is one of the most abused words in current institutional language. It often assumes harmony where there is asymmetry and exclusion. Some of the present universal art values are still based on stereotypes, which shapes a reality that exists nowhere. Hierarchy can be liquidated, but discourse that is inhabitable begins by abandoning the fantasy that participation is automatically emancipatory. We’d like to be adjacent to the meaning which society imposes on contemporary reality. This doesn’t mean accessibility should be synonymous to simplification. The interplay of alien perspectives may cause reciprocal formations; the interest of one group may match that of another, but the reverse could occur as well. For us the question of inclusion is focused on creating conditions for different forms of knowledge to evenly exert pressure on the program.

Jakub Jansa, on re evaluating value, cc Lucy Schreurs

IM:
Could you talk to us about an exciting project for the upcoming year?


FS: Currently we’re showing Jakub Jansa, Stijn Peeters, gabi dao, Marcos Kueh and Moe Mustafa (depicted below) curated by Text my Sister, a decentralized platform for contemporary art. Now being honorary sisters, we’re looking forward to working with them in the form of a public program in 2027. Next to the group shows, I’m personally looking forward to this years exhibition of Gummbah, with works like Luuk Tuijmans and World War One or Two. Its also going to be great to work closer with Corpo Máquina, a local performance society.


KJ: Next year I am particularly interested in is the trajectory around Cem A.’s Double Bind; they transform the exhibition into a social arena, like a debate space.

Tom Marioni, Out of Body Circle Drawing, Quay Quinn Wolf, I’m evaluating into something weightless , Ghislaine Leung, Monitors, office, 2025

IM:
How do you see this institution contributing to the Dutch cultural landscape?


FS: In a recent article I wrote about our national cultural policies together with curator Maziar Afrassiabi, we signalled that its current logic increasingly aligns with that of the political fundable agenda, while social, political, economic, and climate-related problems continue to worsen. Socially engaged art, political art, artistic research, art derived from cultural studies, ecological art, activist art, art as entrepreneurship, the commons, and art as social work finds itself incapable of setting an agenda from a position of difference in relation to the status quo, and instead positions itself following along its lines. As a result, in its current state these art forms become ironically depoliticized, devoid of the urgency required for the emergence of a new movement.

Baltan Laboratories expo opening Albert van Abbehuis LR 152

IM:
What distinguishes your approach in programming?



KJ: We program in a manner that is actively inconsistent with dominant economic or cultural powers in the world, which from an institutional standpoint requires questioning the structures through which cultural value is produced in the first place.


FS: In a landscape where artistic production can become a collection of things happening only for the sake of happening, we seek developments that are more or less unpredictable. In our program we’re not looking to communicate consensus, but rather an environment where difference, as opposed to consensus, can be reached.

bimonthly radio show with DVR Collective and guests, 2025 cc Mika Scheepsma.

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BIOS

Fréderique Scholtes (NL, 1995) is director of Van Abbehuis. Between 2016 and 2024, she worked as a curator in NL and belgium, a.o at museums, galleries and dance houses. She teaches and publishes regularly about contemporary art and cultural policy, a.o for Mister Motley and PlatformBK. She works at Utrecht School of the Arts since 2019 and serves as chair of the board of artist-run space LEO XIII.

Kimiya Jahanshahi is a writer and artist, working on the circulation of artistic labour in relation to migration. Her work considers both poetic as well as political structures. In her work she focuses on rearranging fragments of gestures and sculptural elements of daily life. She presented at various art spaces throughout Teheran, Iran and the Netherlands since 2019.

Irini Miga is a multidisciplinary artist, educator, and an editor at Daily Lazy. She works between New York and Athens, Greece.

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Social Media info: @vanabbehuis , @kiimberlite, @frederiquescholtes,  @irini_miga, #VanAbbehuis, #dailylazy

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Just Quist, Media Sails, former office, 2023 cc Peter Cox

Estefana Roman Matesanz, tired shirt holder, site specific performance Laura López Ferrer, Lisa Kiesgen, Ana Paula Lemus Payiatsou, Gaia Cavagliá performance, cc Jonna Bruinsma

Erwin Thomasse, former office

Gabi Dao, on re evaluating value, image maxime lehnen