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ABOUT
Juha van ’t Zelfde is a Finnish-Dutch artist, organiser, and teacher based in Amsterdam. Self-taught and anti-disciplinary, Juha’s work is grounded in pedagogy, club culture and social action, exploring how history, experience, and possibility converge under specific social, political, and economic conditions. Their body of work seeks to make space for desire, grief, imagination, refusal, mutual aid, and collective joy—centred on a vision of culture freed from domination.
Over the past two decades, Juha has initiated and organised a diverse array of projects:
- Club nights including Viral Radio, Anonymous, and Progress Bar;
- Exhibitions such as Dread, A Screaming Comes Across the Sky and The Sprawl;
- Interdisciplinary projects including Shippr, Good Praxis, and If I Must Die, You Must Live, To Tell My Story.
Two moving-image environments—RoXY (2022) and Every Body In The Place (2021)—commissioned by the Nieuwe Instituut in Rotterdam and realised in collaboration with various comrades, function as counter-archives to mainstream historical narratives. This Is The Moment When You See Who You Are (2024) extends this work, reflecting on lives and histories overlooked, misrepresented and erased, and creating a site where memory can be honoured, reclaimed and reimagined.
Juha’s approach draws as much on the ideas of Spinoza, Fanon, Freire, hooks, Moten, Bookchin, Betasamosake Simpson, Firth, Spade, and Le Guin, as on the KLF, Underground Resistance, Deterritorial Support Group, EZLN and Highlander Folk School, as well as histories of resistance, club culture, and radical forms of learning. This foundation informs a practice rooted in liberation and critical approaches to institutional structures.
Over the past two decades, Juha has worked across art, music, technology, and education. He began as a programmer at Lantaren/Venster in Rotterdam (2005–2008), Melkweg in Amsterdam (2006–2008), and the Bimhuis in Amsterdam (2006–2013), while founding Viral Radio in 2006, an independent network for new electronic music that also hosted influential club nights at Paradiso, 11, and Trouw (2006–2013). From 2008 to 2013, he co-ran Non-fiction, an Amsterdam-based studio for cultural innovation. In 2009, he co-founded VURB (Amsterdam, 2009–2013), a European framework for policy and design research on urban computational systems, and later co-founded Shippr (Rotterdam, 2012), a research project exploring maritime computation. He went on to establish De Verdieping (Amsterdam, 2009–2013) and served as a Curatorial Fellow at De Hallen (Haarlem, 2012–2013), before joining the curatorial team of Sonic Acts (Amsterdam, 2013–2020). From 2014 to 2017, he was Artistic Director of Lighthouse (Brighton), and from 2017 to 2021 directed the MA Moving Image programme at the Sandberg Instituut (Amsterdam), followed by a Research Residency at Het Nieuwe Instituut (Rotterdam, 2020–2021). In 2023, he became Head of Fine Art at AKI ArtEZ (Enschede), and currently co-runs Good Praxis (Barcelona, 2023–present) and serves as an International Expert at Art School Maa (Helsinki, 2025–present). He has been an active member of grassroots solidarity movement Verdedig Noord since 2019, building alliances across neighbourhoods, resisting displacement through grassroots organising, community education and cultural programming.
Juha's writings and research have been featured in The Guardian, Dazed, Sleek, The FADER, Crack Magazine, El País, La Repubblica, De Volkskrant, NRC, Volume, and VICE. Their book Dread—The Dizziness of Freedom (Valiz, 2013) represents a significant milestone in this work.
Juha teaches across various contexts, including the DAS Graduate School, and Art School Maa, and collaborates with independent schools, collectives, and temporary learning spaces exploring cultural politics beyond conventional institutions.