Ester Venema's work explores how a body relates to the time in which it lives — and what happens when that time is disrupted. Since 2009, this question has returned across film, paper pulp, screen print, ceramic tiles and textiles. She often works with materials that have already lived a life of their own: atlases, family clothing, glass negatives and found paper.

In her recent quilts, these threads come together. Reused fabrics, printed calendar fragments, drawings and stitches hold personal, familial and historical time at once. The work gives form to the lived experience of a body in transition: rooted in age, while opening toward a new beginning. Skin returns here as something that sheds and regrows — a surface where time is registered, layer by layer.

Ester Venema lives and works in Rotterdam and Haarlem. She studied at the Sandberg Institute and was a resident at the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten. Her work has been shown in the Netherlands and internationally, including at Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, the Van Gogh Museum, W139, Marres and RADIUS, and is held in the collections of CODA Museum, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam and the Ministry of the Interior and Kingdom Relations, among others.

From 2021 to 2025, she was part of the collective Sunflower Soup. Alongside her artistic practice, she works through Dreaming Problems, her visual practice for cultural institutions and social movements.