Eurekaweek - Welcome to Melly!
Dear visitor,
Welcome to Kunstinstituut Melly!
We are delighted to have you here! Today you are visiting Kunstinstituut Melly: a place for contemporary art, ideas and conversations. We create exhibitions, organise events and collaborate with artists, thinkers and people from the neighbourhood. Everything we do revolves around learning from each other and the world around us.
We are located in a former girls' school in the heart of Rotterdam and have been around since 1990. Since then, we have been constantly evolving, just like art itself.
Our current exhibitions
Paulo Nimer Pjota: A Lua e Eu (The Moon and Me)
Saturday 17 May — Sunday 21 September 2025
Paulo Nimer Pjota is an artist whose large-scale works combine painting and drawing on found materials such as metal plates, empty canvases and bags. His compositions bring together images from archaeology, street culture, comic books, advertising, music and mythology through a process of visual sampling – a method he compares to that of a hip-hop producer: ‘When you think about composition, imagine a rapper producing a beat using samples and loops.’ ‘I do the same with my works: I take a fragment from history and reproduce it, then I take another piece and loop it again.’
Saturday 17 May — Sunday 21 September 2025
Ola Hassanain's work moves between architecture, film and spatial strategies. The artist reflects on how power becomes visible and tangible in the built environment. She is interested in places shaped by climate instability, postcolonial legacies and alienation, and thinks about the politics of inhabiting. How do ecological and social systems influence each other over time? As Ola notes, ‘Observation evokes a form of power.’
Simnikiwe Buhlungu: hygrosummons (iter.02)
Saturday 17 May — Sunday 21 September 2025
Simnikiwe Buhlungu's exhibition hygrosummons (iter.02) transforms the Kunstinstiuut Melly building into a porous, responsive space. Simnikiwe literally summons water to show how knowledge, history and ecology circulate and converge. The puddles are not seen as an insignificant detail, but as a place of accumulation, contradiction and cohesion. As she herself says: ‘The work broadens our everyday understanding of how water circulates through humidity, vapour and puddles, by looking again at the complexity of this process and what it can tell us about how knowledge is produced and disseminated.’
35 Years of Minds and Matter: From the archives of Kunstinstituut Melly
Saturday 19 July — Sunday 30 November 2025
In 2025, Kunstinstituut Melly will celebrate its 35th anniversary. Over the past 10 years, the archive has developed into its current form. The archive was created because of the exhibition Were it as If by Bik Van der Pol. Their request for archive material about the relationship between the institute and Rotterdam highlighted the need for accessible archive material. The exhibition was curated by Melly's archivist Marjolijn Kok.
You can find the exhibitions on the 2nd and 3rd floors.
In addition to the exhibitions, we have a residency programme, an event space called MELLY with a bookshop and a café, and a new Space for Education and Participation.
Saturday 17 May — Sunday 21 September 2025
TOOLSHED is the new residency and research programme of Kunstinstituut Melly, which focuses on exploring the tools we use today to build, question and transform cultural institutions.
Friday 20 September 2024 — Sunday 14 September 2025
The second edition of Tools for Conviviality continues our ongoing work to transform the bookshop, café and event space into a vibrant environment that invites people to come together, read, listen, dance, talk and eat with each other. Developed in collaboration with our new neighbours, Hiphophuis, this edition focuses on creating “common ground”.
Space for Education and Participation
Saturday 19 July 2025 — Wednesday 19 July 2028
We are proud to announce the new Education & Participation space at Kunstinstituut Melly: a vibrant and flexible environment focused on learning, meeting, creativity and community exchange.
This space is located on the ground floor of our building and is designed to be a visible and active pillar of our institution, ensuring that education, knowledge sharing and collective learning remain central to our mission. Whether you are a child, student, artist, teacher or visitor, this is a space for curiosity, attention and connection.
Upcoming programme
You can find all upcoming events on our Programmes page.
Become a Friend of Melly!
Would you like to visit more often, learn more about art or even get involved? Then become a Friend of Melly!
As a Friend, you will receive:
- unlimited access to all exhibitions
- invitations to programmes such as workshops and lectures
- discounts on our merchandise and publications
Sign up here, it's easy and fun.
See you soon at Melly!
Witte de Withstraat 50, Rotterdam
www.kunstinstituutmelly.nl/nl/
@kunstinstituutmelly