About us
WET is a Rotterdam-based collective and project space for artists’ moving image. We provide a platform for exhibitions, screenings and workshops, with a focus on artworks which challenge existing orthodoxies, and propose alternative historical, political and aesthetic perspectives. We host a monthly online screening programme, accompanied by a podcast. WET also acts as a support structure for both its members and the artists with whom we work, assisting in the production of works through the exchange of labour, equipment and expertise.
WET was founded in 2018 by Anna Maria Łuczak, Erika Roux, Marta Hryniuk, Nick Thomas and Sophie Bates.
In December 2020 we recorded a podcast with curatorial collective Anorak (Lukas Ludwig, Johanna Markert, and Florian Model) about the interlinked nature of our collective and individual practices, and the Communal Luxury workshop for the Anorak summer school (June 2021, Kunstbüro der Kunststiftung Baden-Württemberg). If you want to know more about us, and our collaboration with Anorak, you can listen to the conversation here:
Nick Thomas
Born 1990, UK. Nick Thomas is an artist based in Rotterdam, working with moving image and sound. He graduated from the MFA programme at the Piet Zwart Institute in 2018, and from the BA Fine Art programme at the Glasgow School of Art in 2012. He has been involved with various artist-run projects, such as Transmission Gallery and Glasgow Open House Arts Festival and, in addition to WET, he is currently a member of Filmwerkplaats. His work tackles relationships between form and politics, with a particular interest in the aesthetics of coexistence: what are the underlying forms which structure our everyday existence, and what do new social formations look like? As a moving image artist working in collaboration with others, he became increasingly interested in the sonic component of films, and began to make his own recordings. He frequently records sound as part of a collaborative filmmaking, as well as making films.
Anna Łuczak
Born 1984, PL. Lives and works in Rotterdam. She graduated from Piet Zwart Institute (MFA), and Willem de Kooning Academy (BA). Participant at Jan van Eyck Academy (2017-18). She works with video in combination with spatial elements. Through her projects she explores subjective, fragmented and intuitive approaches to collective histories and their influence to daily life. She is interested in the way in which images circulate on the Internet, and how their meanings change according to the context, or due to the order of presentation. In her work, Anna has been questioning national identity, social status and the way these external elements shape human life. Since September 2018, together with Angelica Falkeling, she’s running Emotional Channel – a platform for fashion and lifestyle https://emotionalchannel.hotglue.me/.
Erika Roux
Born 1991, Paris, FR. Erika is a visual artist and filmmaker based in Amsterdam. She studied at the Gerrit Rietveld academy in Amsterdam and the Piet Zwart Institute in Rotterdam. She was artist-in-residence at the Jan van Eyck academie in 2021/22. She works mainly with video, she has a rather intuitive and intimate approach to the medium, often using a camera as a tool to create a specific bond with individuals, a group of people, or a community. Her work navigates between the critical potential of fiction and re-enactment and the complications present in documentary material. In both cases, the idea that the camera is a tool registering a performing subject is put forward while domestic and private environments become a place of investigations as a politically and socially charged context. She is interested in looking at situations and spaces in which people redefine the terms and conditions for production, collaboration, or political struggle looking at social spaces and modes of being which – by their own existence and actions – question current hegemonic forms of performing and power structures.
Marta Hryniuk
Born 1991, Warsaw, PL. Marta is an artist based in Rotterdam. She graduated from the Piet Zwart Institute in Rotterdam (MFA), Academy of Arts in Szczecin (MFA) and University of Arts in Poznań (BFA) with and exchange in Naples. She has co-founded and co-run Silverado (2013-2018), an artist-run space and later on an art & curator collective; currently she is involved with WET and Filmwerkplaats. Marta makes video works that explore female biographies and identities – especially those shaped by experiences of displacement – as well as activating relations between cinematic tools and gender. Her work is often entangled with the past; she is particularly interested in the resurfacing of histories in the present, histories which reappear in her own life and the lives of those around. Point of access is usually through storytelling and personal accounts, working with family archives and stories, trying to link them to artist’s own actuality. Her work relies on intuition, intimate encounters, and on empathy being embodied in the camerawork. Pointing the camera is a poetic act at the same time as it is research.
Sophie Bates
Born 1993, London, UK. Sophie is an artist based in Rotterdam, who works with video, performance, writing, photography and live events. Her practice is about relating experiences, performances of courtesy, the failure of language and finding space to be a “self”. She is a vigilant observer and uses observation as a springboard to begin her process. Her habitual documenting practice is a way to understand or make sense of experiences and go back to them. She is concerned with understanding herself and others better through her art practice. She graduated with a Master in Fine Art from the Piet Zwart Institute (MFA) in Rotterdam, 2018 and holds a Bachelor in Fine Art from Newcastle University (BA) UK, 2016.