ROTTERDAM.- Paulo Nimer Pjota is a São Paulo-based artist whose painting practice channels the spirit of remix. Drawing from archaeology, street culture, mythology, and pop iconography, he builds layered compositions that often unfold across raw canvas and scrap metal. Paulo sees equivalence between his role as an artist and that of a hip-hop producer sampling sounds; he lifts and collages imagery across time periods and contexts—dissolving distinctions between varied forms of visual, popular, and cultural iconography.

With A Lua e Eu (The Moon and I), Paulo debuts an entirely new body of work that marks a shift in focus—from urban visual culture to the rural environments of his youth. Drawing on memories of growing up in São José do Rio Preto, this exhibition moves through interior scenes, plant life, and mythological figures to explore more introspective terrain—the compositions are looser, more surreal, and at times nostalgic. Referencing early sketchbook drawings, Paulo's paintings trace an arc back to his early days of mark-making as a child, when drawing was a way of navigating the world with curiosity and imagination.

A Lua e Eu (The Moon and I) is Paulo Nimer Pjota’s first institutional solo exhibition, and his debut in the Netherlands. This project is supported by Ammodo.

Ola Hassanain: The Watcher

Ola Hassanain is an Amsterdam-based artist whose practice moves through architecture, film, and spatial practice to question the politics of inhabiting and how power materialises spatially. Engaging sites shaped by climate precarity, displacement, and postcolonial infrastructures, her work reflects on the lived experience of instability—and on how spatial imaginaries might shift in response.

In The Watcher, her solo exhibition at Kunstinstituut Melly, Hassanain draws from both Dutch and Sudanese landscapes of water management to reflect on the act of watching as a form of care and responsibility. Central to the work is the figure of the watcher, drawn from Sudan’s Gezira irrigation scheme: a community caretaker who observes water levels and signals early signs of flood. A role familiar to communities in Sudan facing environmental precarity, including those from Ola’s own background, it becomes a framework for thinking about how people respond to the slow unfolding of catastrophe—whether natural or engineered.

The film, The Watcher, is commissioned by BAK, basis voor actuele kunst, Utrecht, and presented at Kunstinstituut Melly in its current iteration.

Simnikiwe Buhlungu: hygrosummons (iter.02)

Simnikiwe Buhlungu is an artist based between Johannesburg and Amsterdam whose practice looks at how knowledge is produced, circulated, and felt. Through installations that bring together sound, sculpture, and publishing, she traces overlooked or invisible systems—working with water, language, and time as mutable forms of inquiry. Her research-led approach finds expression in projects that think with, rather than about, the systems and materials they engage—whether through a footnote, a water droplet, or a whispered story. Simnikiwe creates artworks that resist fixed categories, instead favouring mischief, poetry, and resonance as methods of sensing the world.

Her exhibition hygrosummons (iter.02) transforms the building of Kunstinstituut Melly into a porous, responsive site. Spanning multiple floors—from basement to rooftop, the installation features water samples collected from puddles in Rotterdam, Italy, and South Africa, as well as sonic sculptural instruments tuned to humidity and materials that warp, leak, and shift. These components gather into a constellation that treats the puddle not as a minor detail, but as a generative site of accumulation, contradiction, and relation.

hygrosummons (iter.02) is produced by Chisenhale Gallery, London and commissioned by Chisenhale Gallery and Kunstinstituut Melly, Rotterdam. Lead Supporters: Mondriaan Fund and the Embassy of the Kingdom of the Netherlands.

The exhibition is accompanied by a new publication, besides Puleng; dontsa-ring and roving preoccupations (2024), which will be launched on Saturday 28 June in conjunction with North Sea Around Town.