Yolande Zola Zoli van der Heide

Yolande Zola Zoli van der Heide is exhibitions curator at Van Abbemuseum. Her interests lie in diverse intersecting perspectives – institutional, trans-local, feminist, queer, intersectional, and modes that decentre the oppressor in practices of freedom and liberation – to influence art institutional practices.

Previously she was deputy director at Casco Art Institute: Working for the Commons, where she began as an intern in 2008, and worked as producer on several project exhibitions including the Grand Domestic Revolution (2009—2012). More recently she was co-curator of exhibitions, assemblies and events at Casco including: Het is of de Stenen Spreken (silence is a commons) with artists Ama Josephine Budge, Ansuya Blom, Babi Badilov, and Mire Lee (2019); ‘Curating Strategies of Productive Refusal’ with Gabi Ngcobo; co-organiser with Binna Choi, Annette Krauss, Ying Que, Joram Kraaijeveld, Thomas de Groot, Taru Aitola, Teresa Borasino, Harriet Bergman, and Clementine Edwards of ‘Our House is on Fire’, second assembly for commoning art institutions and on art organisations as sites for unlearning, 2019. Yolande is co-editor to several books published with Casco including Unlearning Exercises: Art Organisations as Sites for Unlearning (co-published with Valiz, 2018). She is faculty member at the Dutch Art Institute, Roaming Academy (see All about my mother with co-tutors Sepake Angiama, Binna Choi and Staci Bu Shea and Southern Wave); and is thesis advisor in the Fine Arts department of the Sandberg Institute, Amsterdam.

Currently on her nightstand:

bell hooks and Stuart Hall, Uncut Funk: A Contemplative Dialogue, bell hooks and Stuart Hall

Toni Morrison, The Source of Self Regard: Selected Essays Speeches, and Mediations

Currently listening to: Conflict, Ebo Taylor & Uhuru Yenzu