May you read me like a poem
Ada M. Patterson, Gamze Öztürk, Jeltje Schuurmans, Luca Calderó, Zela Odessa Palmer
Ada M. Patterson, Gamze Öztürk, Jeltje Schuurmans, Luca Calderó, Zela Odessa Palmer
Curated by Rayne Geurtsen
OPENING SEPTEMBER 18, 17.00
19 - 27 SEPTEMBER 2026
May you read me like a poem frames the body as a universe — stratified, exposed, and quietly unyielding. The exhibition interrogates bodily discomfort as it's molded by society — how we navigate the systems we're born into, and where our own bodies feel inadequate against the ideals we're held to. Drifting through an introspective space loaded with autobiographical work, the artists render identity, desire, and loss into a shared, subconscious vocabulary.
Ada Maricia Patterson is an artist, writer and educator based between Barbados, London and Amsterdam. She works with drawing, masquerade, music, performance, poetry, textiles and video, considering what it means to change under duress and what life can look like under existential threat. Patterson is an alumna resident of the Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten, Amsterdam.
Gamze Öztürk is a multidisciplinary artist based in Rotterdam. Her practice spans live art, installation, textiles, and drawing, and centres on making visible the silent languages of women within restrictive social structures and patriarchal systems. Working with motifs tied to body politics, she explores local rituals, oral histories, and traditional craftsmanship, revealing the poetic language embedded in forms such as carpets and embroidery. Through long-
duration performances and installations, she reawakens rituals passed down through generations. Her recent research focuses on Oya: The Silent Language of Anatolian Women, examining the symbolic meanings of lacework, which historically serves as a discreet mode of communication among women.
In today’s rapidly shifting cultural landscape, she works to archive the traces of this fading language through interviews with lace makers and intergenerational storytelling. By investigating the subversive potential of Oya, she develops new performative structures and symbolic gestures that weave together women’s hair, memory, and lace-making traditions.
Jeltje Schuurmans (1996) is a multidisciplinary artist from the Netherlands. She approaches her work as a bodily archive: a place where emotions, impressions, and images come together, shift, and reorganize themselves. Her practice focuses particularly on the estranged body, a vessel that leaks, tears, heals, and sheds its skin. The body becomes a site shaped by generations, memory, and its continuous relationship with its surroundings.
Her installations reveal an inner world in which impressions and fragments of memory merge with dreams. Through sculpture, audio, video, and text, Schuurmans creates immersive environments in which these internal processes are given spatial form. The boundary between inside and outside, protection and exposure, is a recurring concern throughout her work. Her practice exists in the space between recognition and estrangement, between physical presence and inner experience.
Luca Calderó (Barcelona, 1999) is an artist and researcher. The backbone of their practice is writing, which they understand as embodied and expanded, taking the form of performance, text, video, or installation. They are currently researching vulnerabilty—the body’s capacity to be wounded—as a space of relation to the transcendent, a field they refer to as Somatomysticism.
They studied Fine Arts at the University of Barcelona and are currently pursuing the Master of Artistic Research at the Royal Academy of Art, The Hague, with the support of the Fundación Botín Art Grant 2025–2026. Their work has received the Art Jove Producció Award (2023) and the Barcelona Crea Grant (2024), and has been exhibited at Sala d’Art Jove (Barcelona, 2023), Punt WG (Amsterdam, 2024), Paradise (The Hague, 2025), and the Felicia Fuster Foundation (2026). Their performances have been presented at Hangar (Barcelona, 2025), the Joan Brossa Foundation (Barcelona, 2026), and Espai nyamnyam (Mieres, 2026).
Zela Odessa Palmer (1997) is a visual artist living and working in Amsterdam, where she was born and raised. She received her BFA at the Royal Academy of Art, The Hague in 2022. Palmer explores the connection between language and identity through automatic writing and drawing. She calls her works mental landscapes that question her position in the world.