{"id":505960,"date":"2026-06-18T11:22:11","date_gmt":"2026-06-18T11:22:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/505960\/"},"modified":"2026-06-18T11:22:11","modified_gmt":"2026-06-18T11:22:11","slug":"redesign-of-dutch-van-abbemuseum-aims-to-make-museum-going-more-accessible-the-art-newspaper","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/505960\/","title":{"rendered":"Redesign of Dutch Van Abbemuseum aims to make museum-going more accessible – The Art Newspaper"},"content":{"rendered":"

Are they lockers or a work of art? Instead of normal keyrings, the new lockers at the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven have their keys attached to unique fidget toys. It is, according to Daisy Dawson\u2014who is part of the\u00a0ADEZIV<\/a>neurodivergent design network that is collaborating with the Van Abbemuseum\u2014one of the ways the city museum for this high-tech Netherlands region is reaching out to a broader public. <\/p>\n

\u201cA stim tool is a tool that people who are on the [autism or ADHD] spectrum use to regulate their system, but we believe that everyone will benefit from this kind of approach,\u201d says Dawson, holding a silvery chain inspired by the Dommel River that is just outside the building. \u201cThe title of the piece is Touching the Museum without Touching the Museum.\u201d On another wall is a sensory map suggesting environmental factors that audiences might find triggering, like bright light or buzzing noises in each room in the new Collection as Cosmos<\/a> exhibition.<\/p>\n

These modifications are part of \u201cSystem Thinkers\u201d, a new long-term initiative at the Van Abbemuseum that embeds artists directly within the museum\u2019s thinking and operations. The inaugural cohort includes the artists Ayoung Kim, john gerrard, Ayumi Paul, the artists and scholars Kate Crawford and Vladan Joler, and the Eindhoven-based network ADEZIV.<\/p>\n

In June, the museum\u2014which is home to 3,600 works of predominantly contemporary art, but also by Modernists such as Pablo Picasso and Marc Chagall\u2014launched a new design and direction under the director Defne Ayas<\/a>, who was appointed in September 2025. Everything from the caf\u00e9 and reception desk to the collection has been moulded into a new shape for an international public, she says. \u201cSpatial designers brought the whole sensory intelligence to the museum to make experiences sensual\u2014sometimes I even use the word erotic\u2014so people feel more alive,\u201d she says. \u201cHow do you feel a museum? Can we really think about 33 senses? Even though we know the world is changing, we\u2019re all an essential part.\u201d<\/p>\n

Collaborative approach<\/p>\n

The \u201creconfigured\u201d building is organised into two segments. A ground floor section features collaborations with the \u201csystem thinkers\u201d, including gerrard\u2019s Ghost Feed (2025) digital simulation, inspired by environmental destruction, and Delivery Dancer: Time Curves, an exhibition exploring cinematic and algorithmic worlds of movement and control by Kim.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

An installation view of Ayuong Kim\u2019s Delivery Dancer: Time Curves at the Van Abbemuseum<\/p>\n

\u00a9 Van Abbemuseum<\/p>\n

Upstairs in the museum, which was founded by the cigar manufacturer Henri van Abbe, more than 250 works have now been reordered non-chronologically. Curtains appear halfway down the walls, a sharp sculpture juts at head height along a corridor as light levels vary. There are blasts of opera, which Ayas calls \u201cthe sound of death, but also the sound of the orgasmic\u201d.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat we have done is essentially address the white cube,\u201d says the senior exhibitions curator Yolande van der Heide. \u201cCollection as Cosmos is looking at the collection [as] star clusters across time, an arrangement that\u2019s not ordering the collection in a linear sense.\u201d<\/p>\n

There is a forest of contemporary sculptures in one room. Other spaces including the top floor are inspired by the view of the night sky as seen from the southern hemisphere. Dotted around the museum are boxes of donations from 90 local people who were invited to contribute a household object that they connected with the collection for Van Abbe\u2019s 90th\u00a0birthday.<\/p>\n

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The two-storey Van Abbemuseum features collaborations and 250 works of art displayed in non-chronological order <\/p>\n

Photo: Boudewijn Bollmann \u00a9 Van Abbemuseum<\/p>\n

From a calendar of events to a room created by the Paris-based artist Sarkis, where people are invited to paint inside bowls of water, the museum aims to invite interactions\u2014even when a work is no longer present. The Wassily Kandinsky painting\u00a0View of Murnau with Church (1910), which was part of the museum’s collection, was recently acknowledged to\u00a0be Nazi-looted art<\/a>\u00a0that had disappeared from a German Jewish family\u2019s collection when they fled to the Netherlands. In its place is a print and an \u201cUIT transport\u201d receipt\u2014proof that it has been given back to its rightful owners.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Are they lockers or a work of art? Instead of normal keyrings, the new lockers at the Van…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":505961,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[307,304,305,306,308,93,4197,61,60,14363,4540,10586],"class_list":["post-505960","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-arts-and-design","tag-arts","tag-arts-and-design","tag-artsanddesign","tag-artsdesign","tag-design","tag-entertainment","tag-exhibitions","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-modern-art","tag-museums","tag-neurodiversity"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/505960","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=505960"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/505960\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/505961"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=505960"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=505960"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=505960"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}