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:
Born 1984, Łódź, PL. Lives and works in Rotterdam. She graduated from Piet Zwart Institute (MFA), and Willem de Kooning Academy (BA). Łuczak was artist-in-residence at the Jan van Eyck Academie in 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.
Erika Roux 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. Roux was artist-in-residence at the Jan van Eyck Academie in 2021/22. Her practice consists of a body of video works, short films, multichannel video installations and publications. With a rather intuitive, DIY and intimate approach to video and filmmaking, her work often navigates between the critical potential of fiction and re-enactment and the complications of documentary material. She investigates the different stages of film production as a framework for encounters and collaborations with others. Within her work, she looks at and learns from existing communities, (temporary) social spaces and situations in which people redefine the terms and conditions for production, collaboration, or political struggle, challenging the current hegemonic forms of living and power structures. It is often in the everyday and trivial gestures that she finds the expression of systemic and political questions, domestic and private environments often becoming a place of investigation as politically and socially charged contexts.
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.
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.
Marta Hryniuk is artist and filmmaker currently based in Rotterdam. She studied Fine Arts at the University of Arts in Poznań, Academy of Art in Szczecin, and the Piet Zwart Institute in Rotterdam. Her works bridges documentary, artists’ moving image and installation. She works in a long-term collaboration with Nick Thomas. Their collaborative practice is devoted to the radical potential of film and video. They seek out places and subjects which embody certain forms of resistance, and which offer insights into ways of living ‘otherwise’, opening up questions around freedom, agency and solidarity. They are interested in the utopian social projects of the twentieth century and their legacies; feminist and migration histories take a central role. Since 2019, they have been increasingly involved in Ukraine, making multiple films, working with Ukrainian artists, and engaging in volunteer humanitarian efforts, an ongoing relationship which shapes our current artistic output. As well as working in collaboration Marta has always been involved in self-organising and grassroots activities, recognising the necessity of building independent structures of mutual support and dialogue. Between 2013-17 she was a co-founding member of Silverado; she is also a member of Filmwerkplaats, an artist-run 16mm film lab in Rotterdam.