Niels Bekkema

is a Dutch artist and writer currently located in Rotterdam. He graduated in 2016 from the Piet Zwart institute with an MA in fine arts. The past year he has been working on a film capturing the rotary motion of the Dwingeloo Radiotelescope. He writes articlesfor de Nieuwe, and recently his work has been exhibited in Rotterdam, Johannesburg and Mexico-City. This summer, he will be an artist in residence at the Leighton studios in Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity. His filmworks, installations, and short stories point to the strangeness that sometimes erupts in the midst of everyday life. Attending to these small moments of disorientation, contradiction and rupture, as well as the bewitchment of ordinary language, his work exposes the hidden narratives and codes that organize daily experience. Niels explores the potential for new ways of framing reality, making poetic alterations to existing sites, structures and stories. In this way, his works propose alternative relations to time, the environment and others, opening up a speculative space in which to renegotiate our relationship with the familiar.