Renée van Oploo
Fine artist & researcher
info@reneevanoploo.nl
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BIO
As a visual artist I bring together practice and reflection, using installations, essays, workshops and collaborative projects to question how art might create space for shared experience and ethical thought. Alongside my practice I teach at St. Joost School of Art & Design and conduct research at the Centre of Applied Research for Art, Design and Technology (CARADT), and I work collectively as part of YAFF. Research
Imagining Uncertainty
Beyond Measurable Futures
(2026)
Paper presented at the
PIONEER Alliance Conference
Download PDF (PDF)
Keywords: public art; uncertainty; common good; imagination; urban collaboration
ABSTRACT
This article examines public art as a practice that sustains uncertainty and difference over time and keeps collective imagination in motion. Drawing on two case studies, Draaiend Huis by John Körmeling in Tilburg and the Modellprojekt Haus der Statistik in Berlin, the article shows how artistic interventions open spaces in which questions of space and ownership are not settled and responsibility remains subject to ongoing negotiation.
Rather than approaching public art as a means of producing consensus or clearly measurable outcomes, the article understands artistic practice as a way of working through friction and hesitation, allowing disagreement to persist. In Tilburg, a recurring moment of disruption repeatedly reactivates public debate, while in Berlin an artistic intervention gradually develops into a long-term collaborative experiment around shared use and collective ownership.
Read together, the cases show how public art operates not primarily as an object or a message but as a sustained practice that keeps situations of negotiation and imagination open. The article argues that the value of public art lies in its ability to endure as an open-ended process, maintaining contested spaces in which common futures can be imagined without being fixed in advance.