19 Sep 2017 | 4,132 views
Elke Uitentuis (1977) is a visual artist based in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. She rounded up her MA research at the Jan van Eyck Academy in Maastricht in 2014. She got her BA Visual Arts at the AKI, Art Academy in Enschede in 2001 and her BA teachers’ degree in Art and Art history at the AHK in Amsterdam in 1999. From 2005 till 2013 Elke was part of atist duo Osterholt/ Uitentuis. Together with her colleague Wouter Osterholt she realized politically engaged community art projects at, among others, the Townhouse gallery in Cairo, the MAK center in Los Angeles, the Istanbul biennale in Istanbul, IASKA in Perth, Capacete in Rio de Janeiro and SKOR in Amsterdam. The projects Osterholt/ Uitentuis realized were most of times investigating possibilities to create a sense of commons and belonging within contexts that were heavily defined by hegemonic power structures. When the artist duo Osterholt/ Uitentuis stopped their collaborative practice in 2013, Elke got involved with the Amsterdam based refugee collective We Are Here. She founded Here to Support, an organization that strives for emancipation of undocumented migrants. Under the umbrella of Here to Support, Elke Uitentuis set up several educational and cultural projects that enable undocumented migrants to express and develop themselves. Examples are the ‘We Are Here Academy’, a school for undocumented migrants and theater play ‘Labyrinth’. In 2016 Elke left Here to Support to again focus solely on her artistic practice. Currently she is working on a graphic novel about fleeing Europe, an investigative story about human trafficking, borders and identity.