Risk Hazekamp

Risk Hazekamp (pronouns: they/them) is an interdependent visual artist and researcher. Risk is also an art educator in the broadest sense of the word. For more than twenty years, their work has revolved around the complex and constantly changing relationship between body and image. Gender has been a central element, not only as a subject, but also as a theoretical framework. For the past ten years, Risk has applied questions formulated within the theme of gender to other socio-political issues. Through a combination of personal activism, decolonial practices and analogue (currently organic) photography, visual intersectional processes are developed to change existing systems. In doing so, Risk takes on the position of a student as often as possible to unlearn photography.

After their studies at the Willem de Kooning Academy in Rotterdam and the Jan van Eyck Academy in Maastricht, Risk worked and lived in Berlin for 11 years. Their work has been shown extensively at international art fairs, such as Art Cologne, Arco Madrid, Art Forum Berlin, Liste Basel and Paris Photo. In 2010, Risk decided to no longer participate in commercial art contexts. Since this decision, long-running often ongoing projects are preferably presented on locations where space, subject and time are interrelated.

Risk has taught at various art academies, including teaching Photography from 2010 to 2014 at the Maastricht Academy of Fine Arts, and from 2015 onwards at St Joost School of Art & Design in the Art & Research department and the minor Arts & Humanity.

Most recently, they graduated ‘magna cum laude’ from the Advanced Master of Research in Art & Design of the Sint Lucas School of Arts in Antwerp and took part in the Decolonial Summer School, a collaboration between the Van Abbemuseum Eindhoven and the University College Roosevelt of Utrecht University.