Sensory Connection

Wanneer: 12 march 2026 - 13 may 2026

Sensory Connection is a multisensory experience that invites five artists to explore the boundaries of visual art. This exhibition goes beyond the visual – it focuses on the other senses: hearing, feeling, smelling, and touching. Visitors are invited not only to behold art but to experience it actively and profoundly. By appealing to our senses, a space is created for true connection and inclusivity, in which everyone – including people with visual impairments – can feel connected to the art and to one another.

The exhibition will be opened on Thursday, March 12, by Alicia Hoost, heritage specialist and expert in the field of accessibility. Register here for the opening!

In a world characterized by conflict and unpredictable events, a sense of powerlessness is growing. The chaos around us overwhelms us, and it seems as if we have little control over what happens. In this time of uncertainty, the question arises: how can we remain calm and breathe, even when everything around us is faltering? The exhibition Sensory Connection seeks answers in the smallest yet most meaningful actions: the connections we make, the sensory experiences we share, and the moments of encounter that remind us of our shared humanity.

Experiencing with Your Senses

The five artists – Daeun Lim, Pedro Matias, Azzura Ruimschotel, Sjoerd Schunselaar, and Mariëlle Videler – share their work and stories from their own unique perspectives, featuring themes that challenge us to reflect on encounter, experience, connection, and mutual perception.

This exhibition is an invitation to experience art not only with your eyes but with all your senses. It is a search for the intimate, vulnerable, and complex ways in which we perceive each other and the world around us, and how art enables us to share and understand these experiences on a deeper level.

The artists in Sensory Connection explore the boundaries of traditional art. Daeun Lim investigates the boundaries of identity and imposed roles in an almost theatrical manner, which, through interaction with the audience, creates a kind of sensory experience that goes beyond mere looking. Pedro Matias connects ecology and art through a sculptural and audiovisual installation that is not only visual but also influences your experience through sound and movement. In the work of Sjoerd Schunselaar, touch forms the basis for connection, with his installation exploring how bodies can communicate, even without words. Azzura Ruimschotel uses cultural stories and scents to provide a glimpse into the intertwining of different worlds, evoking a sense of shared identity and connectedness. Mariëlle Videler, with her textile sculptures resembling vessels or veins, invites us to feel and reflect on the ways in which life and energy centers function within the human body and nature.

Participating Artists

Daeun Lim – a push over

Daeun Lim (USA, 1990), born in the US and raised in South Korea, has lived in the Netherlands since 2012. Her work focuses on installations and material environments, utilizing objects, text, and space. She investigates the relationships formed by her body, with a focus on time, personal interactions, and material connections. This includes the connections between past, present, and future, as well as relationships with others and objects. In her work, she addresses processes of endurance, preparation, and continuation, considering emotional states such as desire, resignation, and perseverance as structural conditions. Lim approaches her work through processes of endurance, preparation, and continuation, viewing emotional states like desire, resignation, and perseverance as structural conditions. Physical perception and material engagement serve as important analytical tools, with an emphasis on experiential and multisensory perception.

Her installation a push over imagines the artist’s day as a 24-hour theater stage and unfolds its preparation – the roles yet to be played – as a behind-the-scenes exhibition space. Visitors are introduced to scripts for the performance and props the artist must wear – masks, accessories, costumes, and postures – which they are permitted to read, wear, and use. The scripts are available in Korean, English, and Braille, and the work is designed to be accessible beyond visual perception. The objects function as sensory devices, experienced as much through weight, scent, sound, and touch as through form. The work invites the audience to meet and experience the many versions of Daeun Lim, positioned between labels such as Korean, American, immigrant, woman, artist, and worker.

Pedro Matias – Phylum Porifera

Pedro Matias (Portugal, 1984) is an artist and researcher working with sculpture, video, sound, and installations. Their work explores how bodies – both human and more-than-human – acquire knowledge through permeability, attunement, and interdependence rather than autonomy. Materials are not representations but sites where form, process, and ethics converge. Matias’s installations encourage viewers to feel, rather than just look, prioritizing the experience of relationships over visual dominance. They investigate how art can function as a living system that accepts change and instability. The artist works from philosophies such as feminism, queer-crip, and ecology, questioning material ethics and sustainability in art.

Phylum Porifera is a sculptural audiovisionary environment where ceramic forms, moving images, sound, and text together form an intra-reactive system. Hand-coiled clay, featuring 3D-printed fossil geometries and volatile glazes, represents porous, interdependent bodies. Phylum Porifera approaches montage as an ecological process, unfolding through cyclic and unstable layers of time. Landscapes and micro-ecologies act as co-creators, forming a physical, responsive way of filmmaking. Together, sculpture and film function as a living system that redistributes authorship and invites mutual perception.

Azzura Ruimschotel – Beye’āyinetu በየአይነቱ

Artist Azzurra Ruimschotel (NL, 2000) falls in love quickly, usually stemming from a sudden interest or challenge. These butterflies in her stomach drive her to research and deepen her understanding of the subject. Along the way, she asks herself, the subject, and others critical questions to maintain a sharp connection with the idea. She consciously selects materials, techniques, and forms that align with the central concept or feeling. Her work process is intuitive and sensory: although she begins with a general plan, she leaves room for what her senses tell her. The material and her body guide the decision-making process. Often, her work carries a deeper meaning connected to principles and ideas she values, allowing an initial infatuation to grow into a deeper love.

Beye’āyinetu በየአይነቱ means ‘diverse’ or ‘different’ in Amharic. It is also the title of Ruimschotel’s textile work. Literally, the textile work is diverse through the use of various fabrics, colors, shapes, and techniques. Figuratively, it is a collection of personal and collective stories, inspired by her family, environment, and history. Through this work, she explores her cultural identity, using textiles, scent, language, and sound to share stories of connection and cultural intertwining. Dutch, Indonesian, Italian, and Eritrean-Ethiopian cultures form the foundation of these stories, with influences from Arabic and Surinamese-Creole culture.

Sjoerd Schunselaar – Touch in Resonance

The artistic career of Sjoerd Schunselaar (NL, 1990) began with dismantling a Game Boy and eventually evolved into creating three-dimensional objects made from raw materials such as wood, stone, and natural rubber. By combining these materials with physical phenomena such as body temperature, sound, and electrical impulses, his work seeks to bridge the gap between humans and technology.

In his work, he makes invisible elements of nature visible through technology. Using machines and instruments, he translates research results into visual pieces with a minimalist and mysterious aesthetic. In this way, he offers a new perspective on what previously seemed invisible – from the dust in our pockets to the warmth of our hands.

Touch in Resonance invites visitors to experience a living connection between two stones through touch. The installation makes it palpable that we are not separate from one another but are constantly in vibration with each other. A small movement, a touch, or an inner impulse can trigger an echo in another. The work explores how meaning arises through transmission between bodies, even without words. In this way, the installation functions as a sensory metaphor for human connection and communication.

Mariëlle Videler – Veins

For artist Mariëlle Videler (NL, 1970), ‘being’ means making the world. With a symbiotic gaze, she seeks to move fluidly from the human world to the more-than-human world or beyond being human. Images and stories help us navigate through life and imagine connections with other life forms such as plants, animals, and rivers. Love for life in all its forms and the creation of portals to ‘being’, without distinction between human and non-human, form the core of her artistic path. Videler identifies as a traveler who primarily undertakes imaginary journeys. She explores visual languages, drawings, patterns, materials, and rituals used to imagine connections with other life forms.

Specially for the exhibition at CBK Zuidoost, Videler created a new series of textile sculptures, featuring linocut, embroidery, cutwork, and various yarns. They consist of four colorful columns, constructed in the center with a pattern of small organic shapes sewn together. This creates small openings through which one can look inside and through. This gives the massive forms, reaching from floor to ceiling, a tactile and almost fluid character. Thinking of vessels and veins, piping systems for blood and water that run through the earth and the bodies of humans, animals, and plants alike, Videler calls the works: Veins.

Photo: work by Pedro Matias

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