Van Abbemuseum Recasts Its Collection With Accessibility and a New Curatorial Logic
At the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven, the first signs of change are not on the walls but in the details: locker keys attached to fidget toys, a sensory map flagging bright light and buzzing sounds, and a redesign that treats the visitor’s body as part of the museum experience. The Dutch institution has folded these adjustments into “System Thinkers,” a long-term initiative that places artists and scholars inside the museum’s operations rather than at its edges.
The project arrives under director Defne Ayas, who was appointed in September 2025 and unveiled the museum’s new direction in June. Ayas has described the redesign as an effort to make the building feel more sensual and more alive, with spatial designers shaping everything from the café and reception desk to the collection galleries. The museum, founded by cigar manufacturer Henri van Abbe, holds 3,600 works, largely contemporary art, alongside Modernist holdings by Pablo Picasso and Marc Chagall.
The inaugural “System Thinkers” cohort includes Ayoung Kim, john gerrard, Ayumi Paul, the artists and scholars Kate Crawford and Vladan Joler, and the Eindhoven-based ADEZIV network. Their presence is visible in the reconfigured building, which is now divided into two broad zones. On the ground floor, visitors encounter collaborative projects such as gerrard’s digital simulation Ghost Feed (2025), shaped by environmental destruction, and Delivery Dancer: Time Curves, Kim’s exhibition on cinematic and algorithmic systems of movement and control.
Upstairs, more than 250 works have been reordered non-chronologically in Collection as Cosmos, a display that resists the familiar museum habit of linear progress. Curtains cut across the walls, light levels shift from room to room, and a sculpture can appear at head height in a corridor, interrupting the expected flow of looking. Yolande van der Heide, the senior exhibitions curator, said the aim was to address the “white cube” and to imagine the collection as “star clusters across time.”
That logic extends beyond display. In one room, a forest of contemporary sculpture creates a dense visual field; elsewhere, the top floor draws on the night sky as seen from the southern hemisphere. Around the museum, boxes of donations from 90 local residents mark Van Abbe’s 90th birthday, each containing a household object linked in some way to the collection.
The museum is also making room for absence and restitution. In a space created by the Paris-based artist Sarkis, visitors are invited to paint inside bowls of water. Nearby, Wassily Kandinsky’s View of Murnau with Church (1910), once in the museum’s collection, is represented by a print and an “UIT transport” receipt after being identified as Nazi-looted art and returned to the family from which it disappeared. In Eindhoven, accessibility, curation, and historical repair are being treated as parts of the same institutional question: what should a museum feel like, and for whom?
