What we carry forward
10.07.2026 - 14.07.2026
What we carry forward
Graduation show,
Master in Fine Arts, Sandberg Institut
Loods 6, Amsterdam
At Loods6, a former harbour warehouse on KNSM-laan shaped by movement, storage, trade and exchange, the Fine Arts Graduation Show gathers artists whose practices look toward new ways of seeing, relating and making. The building’s history, including its connection to goods such as cacao and to Amsterdam’s wider colonial history and maritime past, reminds us that every site carries traces. Here, those traces become invitations: to listen more carefully, to question what has been inherited, and to imagine what can be transformed.
Cacao seeds carry more than sweetness. They carry histories of soil, labour, distance, violence, care and transformation. They remind us that what is small can hold great complexity, and that what has been stored can also be planted again. In this exhibition, the seed becomes a way of thinking about artistic practice: as something that carries memory, but also potential.
The artists open spaces where complexity can be held with attention, and courage. They move through family dinners, leaking cups, sacred figures, speculative worlds, diasporic retellings, burning houses, digital statues, inherited memories, photographic archives and collective objects.Their practices do not turn away from inherited structures, silences and histories. Instead, they hold them carefully, asking what can still be repaired, reimagined, and allowed to grow otherwise.
Emerging from the Fine Arts Department of the Sandberg Instituut, the exhibition reflects an environment where artistic development is nurtured. Assessments are not about fitting into fixed standards, but about supporting artists in finding the courage to develop a practice that is autonomous, situated, socially engaged and alive. What matters is not only what is made, but how each artist thinks, reflects, relates and takes responsibility for their own process.
This graduation show is not only a presentation of final works. It is a threshold. What is gathered here is not certainty, not a final harvest, but a field of beginnings. The show looks ahead by asking what art can still make possible: new relations, new responsibilities, and new ways of living with one another.
Judith Leysner
Course Director Fine Art department