Dezeen School Shows: a flesh-like installation where "body, material, object and environment" work in mutual dependency is among the innovative projects by students at the Royal Academy of Art, The Hague (KABK).
Also included is an installation informed by quantum physics and a project that explores the vulnerability of living organisms through sculpture.
Royal Academy of Art, The Hague (KABK)
School: Royal Academy of Art, The Hague (KABK)
Courses: BA and MA programmes in Art and Design
Department heads: Carl Johan Högberg, Antoinette Vonder Mühll, Lauren Alexander, Chantal Hendriksen, Lotte Sprengers, John Fleetwood, Anthony Faramelli, Herman Verkerk, Sanne Jansen, Gerrit Uittenbogaard, Janice McNab, Jasper Coppes, Shadman Shahid, Jonas Althaus, Hans Venhuizen, Niels Schrader and Erik van Blokland
School statement:
"The Royal Academy of Art, The Hague (KABK), is a space where students have the freedom and support to explore their creative potential, while keeping their individual discipline and ideas central.
"At the academy, classrooms function as laboratories where students experiment, and tutors stimulate rather than direct.
"Each tutor combines their role with a professional practice in the cultural sector, which is reflected in their teaching style. By graduation, students have developed the tools needed to establish and situate their own unique practice.
"KABK provides a wide range of workshops. Students can work with textiles, ceramics, wood and metal, master traditional printing techniques or explore the 3D Lab and experiment with 3D printing.
"Workshop tutors, who also have extensive professional experience, are on hand to turn the students' ideas into reality.
"During the Graduation Show 2026, more than 220 art and design works were displayed. The exhibition reflected both the personal and collective experiences of more than 220 international graduates during their time at the academy.
"The projects by bachelor's, master's and PhD students explored a wide range of social and contemporary themes, from sustainability to quantum physics."
Will We Align? by Irja Linnerud
"Will We Align? is an installation inspired by quantum communication. It invites us to explore an unknown system. Light is being used as a visual language for relationships and directions.
"In this installation, the two central light sources are entangled: when one changes, so does the other. This behaviour is inspired by quantum entanglement, a phenomenon that challenges our everyday understanding of connection, and forms one basis of emerging quantum communication technologies.
"The work uses these principles as a starting point for a broader question: how do we engage with technologies and systems that are difficult to see, understand or influence?"
Student: Irja Linnerud
Course: Bachelor Interactive Media Design
Aftermarket by Jamie Smith
"This year, almost 750,000 used vehicles were no longer able to meet road standards or were simply no longer desirable.
"These cars are being shipped to Africa, and more than half of them will come from Europe. Aftermarket follows this journey.
"Through repairs, paperwork, bureaucratic offices and the repurposing of this consumer surplus, these vehicles are transformed in preparation for their new lives.
"As European governments wash their hands of the old and embrace the new, the question of who bears the responsibility for what was arises. How complicit are we in existing structures of global trade?"
Student: Jamie Smith
Course: Bachelor Photography
Negotiating the Grid by Simcha Ziya Moïse
"This project explores image-making changes when it begins from a pre-existing structure rather than an empty surface.
"Using a single element – the circle – within different grid systems, the work examines how variation, repetition, layering and sequence influence the relationship between structure and form.
"The grid is treated not as a neutral background, but as an active participant that shapes decisions and redistributes authorship within the making process.
"The resulting works emerged through an ongoing negotiation between structure and intervention."
Student: Simcha Ziya Moïse
Course: Bachelor Graphic Design
Between Reins and Teeth by Anahita Karimi
"Between Reins and Teeth investigates the vulnerability of humans and animals through garments, living organisms and sculptural installation.
"Challenging the illusion of human superiority, the project dissolves the boundaries between species and positions the body as a site of interdependence.
"Rather than presenting the human as separate from or dominant over the natural world, the work explores coexistence through relationships of dependence, care, exposure and transformation.
"Through fashion, installation and material experimentation, the work invites viewers to reconsider their relationship with the more-than-human world not through dominance, but through empathy and recognition of our fundamental interconnectedness."
Student: Anahita Karimi
Course: Bachelor Textile and Fashion
Soft Fence by Alexandria Liiv
"What's it like to share a space? How does personal space shape our interactions? How do bodies negotiate the tension between separation and connection?
"The project draws from my experience of growing up around wired garden fences and translates their logic into shared environments, reinterpreting their qualities through reclaimed mattress foam.
"By turning a rigid structure into something soft, it creates a permeable threshold that suggests privacy, marks personal space without diminishing openness or becomes a point of encounter and connection.
"Soft fence questions fixed boundaries, proposing instead emotionally responsive physical limits that shift alongside human relationships."
Student: Alexandria Liiv
Course: Bachelor Interior Architecture and Furniture Design
Inklinking by Ruben Dijkstal
"Inklinking is a kinetic sound installation that takes inspiration from the slow sinking and shifting of everyday brick streets.
"Suspended between the architecture above and the soil beneath, the work functions as a membrane that responds to subtle forces, continuously oscillating between deformation and reordering.
"Through movement and sound, the installation explores how systems that appear stable are constantly shaped by gradual processes of change.
"Small shifts accumulate over time, unsettling the grid and revealing the fragile balance between order and entropy."
Student: Ruben Dijkstal
Course: Bachelor ArtScience
Beyond the Horizon and Below the Waterline by Claire Robin Santen
"Europe's tallest structure is practically invisible. Standing 472 metres tall on the seabed in the North Sea, the Troll A platform is taller than any building on land in Europe. It extracts oil and gas.
"'Beyond the Horizon and Below the Waterline refers to the boundaries that mark the limits of our knowing.
"The footprint behind these limits is not immediately visible, yet man-made structures occupy the sea, extracting resources that become our energy and plastics.
"The work translates this invisibility through video and a sound-transducing steel platform below your feet. It asks: how can something so vast remain unseen?"
Student: Claire Robin Santen
Course: Master Non Linear Narrative
Gallery Zero by Stella Kechagioglou
"In the institution in which everyone has a space, where is the place for the common?
"Gallery Zero is the first self-organised common space within the Royal Academy of Art, The Hague (KABK). Developed in response to the absence of a shared space within the academy, the project explores how underused spaces, materials and social relations can be activated through collective participation.
"Rather than proposing a finished design, Gallery Zero functions as an evolving framework shaped by its users.
"Gallery Zero questions traditional notions of authorship and proposes a model of spatial production based on care, collaboration and shared responsibility."
Student: Stella Kechagioglou
Course: Master Interior Architecture
A Trace of Dinner by Zizi Mitrou
"Having conducted extensive research on the origin of glaze ingredients, I learned that their transportation requires a lot of energy. I began looking for an alternative.
"I realised that all I need to create a glaze is whatever is left on the table. I started reaching out to local restaurants and collecting and processing waste.
"Together with a few restaurants, I sought ways to create menus attuned to the possibilities for glazing. The aim was to create a dinner that was as zero-waste as possible, while the ceramics tell a story about the way we consume."
Student: Zizi Mitrou
Course: Master Industrial Design
Ladder by Gintarė Razmaitė
"The inspiration behind this project lies in Lithuanian wood carving, which is expressed through the intentionally abstracted shapes of diacritics connected to their base letters.
"This approach allows the typeface to be set in large, multi-line headlines without diacritics disrupting the rhythm of the composition.
"Floral ornaments inspired by the Lithuanian tradition of foraging introduce an illustrative layer to the display style.
"The accompanying text typeface is a lighter, more rationalised interpretation of the display design, optimised for reading at smaller sizes.
"Together, they form a versatile type family for a wide range of applications."
Student: Gintarė Razmaitė
Course: Master Type and Media
Litany for a Failing Machine by Priyageetha Dia
"Built around a voice delivering a sermon assembled through a language model's text-prediction process, Litany for a failing machine is an installation that examines the convergence of sonic governance, voice-cloning ethics and end-times rhetoric.
"The work considers how prophetic speech and automation converge within a contemporary colonial matrix of power – the interlocking control of knowledge, authority and language in the datasets and predictive logics from which machine speech is assembled.
"The work attends to how artificial intelligence inherits and amplifies older regimes of epistemic domination, and how statistical prediction acquires the sonic register of belief."
Student: Priyageetha Dia
Course: Master Artistic Research
Fabricated Fears by Fenna Jensma
"Fabricated Fears is a counter-offensive against the visual regimes of far-right politics, and a plea for developing visual literacy.
"I unpacked innocent-looking images that are circulated within two far-right Dutch political parties. These images serve as sedatives, stripping away critical viewing and manipulating the viewer toward radical ideologies.
"Far-right politics is intertwined with the regulation and control of femininity. The 'protection' of (white) femininity is a familiar instrument of state violence.
"My work is based on the understanding that when the image of the 'innocent' white woman is propagated, all women's rights come under pressure and racist violence increases."
Student: Fenna Jensma
Course: Master Photography and Society
Maintenance is Maintenance is Maintenance is Maintenance by Roni(a) Johansson
"Performance and installation form a temporary climate in which body, material, object and environment enter relations of mutual dependency.
"Water functions as both material and infrastructure, continuously altering the conditions of the work through melting, saturation, drying, corrosion, evaporation and accumulation.
"Rather than representing maintenance, the work produces conditions that make maintenance necessary.
"The body does not direct the system but exists as one of its components. It is reorganised by the same material conditions it responds to: carrying, drying, wetting, waiting and repeating."
Student: Roni(a) Johansson
Course: Bachelor Fine Arts
Partnership content
This school show is a partnership between Dezeen and the Royal Academy of Art, The Hague (KABK). Find out more about Dezeen partnership content here.