Mirjam Kooiman

Art Historian / Curator 

Mirjam Kooiman is an art historian and curator at Foam Photography Museum Amsterdam, where she is responsible for a number of exhibitions among which Persijn Broersen & Margit Lukács – Point Cloud, Old Growth, Ai Weiwei – #SafePassage, Paul Mpagi Sepuya – Double Enclosure, Daisuke Yokota – Matter, Awoiska van der Molen – Blanco, and the traveling Foam Talent exhibitions of 2015 and 2016. In 2017 she also initiated a series of collaborations with photography platforms in Mexico, Nigeria and Indonesia in Foam’s project space Foam 3h, in order to create an exchange of cultural knowledge on photography discourses worldwide. She is currently researching how photography can relate to virtual realities, artificial intelligence, gaming and online experiences. Mirjam holds a BA in Art History and a MA in Curating Arts and Culture from the University of Amsterdam, with a special interest in postcolonial approaches in the arts and museum studies. She previously served as a curator-in-training at Amsterdam’s Stedelijk Museum. Mirjam is also co-founder of ‘De Kunstmeisjes’, an Amsterdam-based collective of art historians. With their blog and just released book (Meulenhoff, August 2019), De Kunstmeisjes aim to open up the art world from a non-elitist perspective by breaking with the art jargon in writing about art and exhibitions. She has also written for L’Internationale, Something We Africans Got, Migrant Journal, and she is a regular contributor to Foam Magazine.