Shed is an art space and collective of multidisciplinary artists in Rotterdam, The Netherlands. It serves as both the workspace of its member artists, as well as a platform for engaging the wider Rotterdam + international art scenes.
The public program of Shed is a constantly evolving series of happenings including but not limited to exhibitions, performances, film screenings, reading groups, workshops and/or club nights. Member artists often employ public programming as an important element of their creative practices. In addition we often collaborate with artists outside the collective and we aim to provide a platform for emerging artists to connect with Rotterdam's art scene(s).
Martin Osowski (1998, CA/PL) is a Polish-Canadian artist, filmaker, and writer based in Rotterdam. He is a graduate in Lens-Based Media from the Piet Zwart Institute (MA) and Aerospace Engineering from the Delft University of Technology (BSc).
Martin's research and practice center around questions of ideology, media, and identity, and he looks to explore the mechanisms, implications, and contradictions of these topics across a variety of scales. He is interested in the moments when the ideological becomes intimate, in how our notions of reality and identity are mediated by the symbols and media environments that surround us, and in the politics of what emerges when our subjectivities become entangled in larger webs of social activity and power.
Martin Osowski's studio practice employs a range of media both analogue and digital. He also collaborates on the running of Faun, a community based publication and research collective that aims to develop a discourse towards the theory and praxis of manifesting alternative worlds.
Geo Barcan (1997, RO) is a queer Romanian visual artist and writer based in Rotterdam. In her work Geo engages with multiple mediums such as filmmaking, design, installation art, writing, web-based art and performance.
She weaves ecological thought and vegetality with media theory in her research, speculating on ways in which technology and nature can non-destructively co-exist. Geo’s praxis is rooted in storytelling and (auto)fiction, in surfacing the miraculous out of the ordinary by working with what is to be found at the margins of thought, such as small or vegetal beings. She is also interested in the internet's and new media's transformative impact on different communities. In 2022 she wrote Kid of the Internet (Onomatopee), an autofictional collection of visual and written essays about the evolution of the internet in the early 2000s Romania.
Geo founded Film Mai Aproape Summer School in Romania, a free, alternative visual arts education program dedicated to teenagers. She has a BA in Film and Drama from The University of Kent, UK and a MA in Lens Based Media from the Piet Zwart Institute.
Ollie Paterson (1997, UK) is an interdisciplinary maker with a strong focus on moving image works. Having completed commissions with major art institutions in both the UK and the NL in the realms of audio, film, writing and directing - he is now focusing on synthesizing his interests and expertise in these realms most often into film. His writing and audio projects have always been very filmic - that is to say that the core tenets of film: storytelling and image making, have always been at the forefront of his thinking and execution in all mediums. Now, with this breadth of experience, he continues to make work that exists within this triangulation of his interests - the ephemeral qualities of all forms inform the rest and vice versa. He is always seeking new ways to translate elements of one medium to another, be that a fragment of a poem to a cinematic image, or an untranscribable image into a sound mix.
Antoni Czarczyński (2000, PL) is a documentary-maker from Poland living in Rotterdam. His practice is based on filmmaking and photography.
The direction he pursues is social documentary. His work is driven by reflecting on topics around labour (exploitation, migration) and looking for meaning in this tired world. Antoni likes to dig deep in the geographical and cultural space closest to him. For the last years he has been focusing on the life of the Polish community in the Netherlands.
As a romantic landscape surveyor-painter and performative researcher-storymaker, Bo Emmens (2001, NL) travels around the Netherlands to report on the insubstantial manifestations of the contemporary Dutch culture-nature dialectic. Searching for and relating to places with unclear or complex identities, Bo dives into local feelings of place by drawing subversively traditional land- and cityscapes from carelessly chosen perspectives (oil pastel, pencil, markers on paper). This he combines with writing, acting and the organizing of absurd writing and drawing workshops, in which Bo questions the way we understand and relate to insignificant or prestigeless landscapes.
Bo Emmens graduated cum laude in Art & Research (BA) from St. Joost, Breda, in 2023. He lives and works in Rotterdam.
Mónica Ruiz van Hattem (1967) is a filmmaker born in Spain, now based in the Netherlands. In 2003 she started with video journalism and from 2013 she is dedicated to independent documentaries. In 2016 her first film "The Death of Don Quixote" won the Young Jury Prize at FIDBA Buenos Aires IDFF. In 2019, the short "Symphony of the Body" was awarded with a Special Mention at Fiver, International Dance Film Festival (Spain). Nowadays she's developing her second feature film, Oma, about intergenerational trauma based on the history of the Moluccas, a former Dutch colony. Displacement and the desire for connection is her main theme of work.