bio | Yolande Zola Zoli van der Heide is exhibitions curator at Van Abbemuseum. Her interests lie in diverse intersecting perspectives – institutional, trans-local, feminist, queer, intersectional, and modes that decentre the oppressor in practices of freedom and liberation – to influence art institutional practices. Previously she was deputy director at the Casco Art Institute: Working for the Commons, where she began as an intern in 2008, and worked as a producer on several project exhibitions including the Grand Domestic Revolution (2009–2012). More recently she was co-curator of exhibitions, assemblies and events at Casco including Het is of de Stenen Spreken (silence is a commons) with the artists Ama Josephine Budge, Ansuya Blom, Babi Badilov, and Mire Lee (2019); Curating Strategies of Productive Refusal with Gabi Ngcobo; and co-organiser of the second assembly for commoning art institutions and on art organisations as sites for unlearning, 2019. Yolande is co-editor of several books published with Casco, including Unlearning Exercises: Art Organisations as Sites for Unlearning (co-published with Valiz, 2018). She is a faculty member at the Dutch Art Institute, Roaming Academy (see All About My Mother and Southern Wave). Currently on her nightstand are the book The Stars and the Blackness Between Them by Junauda Petrus, The Black Unicorn by Audre Lorde, and Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates, while she’s currently listening to Love and Death, by Ebo Taylor & Uhuru Yenzu.
Note: The biography describes the position of the narrator at the time of their participation in the Glossary of Common Knowledge. Given the long duration of the project, the narrator may have changed their respective position.
