ART SCIENCE dialogue with Simone Albers and André van der Braak
September 29th, 2026 | 4.00 – 5.30 PM
Join us for the second ART SCIENCE dialogue of Realms of Reality with artist Simone Albers, Angela Rothaan and researcher André van der Braak. Miranda van Holland will be moderating. The conversation forms part of a collaboration with 3D and will take place in the gallery.
The dialogue will center Albers’s work and further elaborate the themes of humans’ relationship to, and self-understanding within, the more-than-human world by looking at the underlying philosophical attitudes held in society and how they are reflected in cultural objects and depictions of nature. This work takes as its starting point the classic board game Snakes and Ladders, of which a similar iteration exists across many different cultures. She reimagines it as grandiose, structurally cyclic, and visually infinite to challenge the ideas of moralism and linearity inherent in the original cultural artifact.
Simone Albers is a Dutch artist currently living and working in the Netherlands. She holds Bachelor’s of Fine Arts degrees from ArtEZ University of the Arts, Arnhem and Robert Gordon University, Aberdeen. She works across painting, sculpture and installation to explore the ways in which we interrelate to the more-than-human world. Ontoepistimological questions on the nature of reality and the reach of our understanding continue to spark her curiosity. By interweaving philosophy, symbolism, cosmology and scientific insights and images, she creates new representations that centralize the complexity of natural systems, rejecting reductionism and appropriation to ultimately challenge the anthropocentric worldview. Her works are held in the collections of the Cultuurfonds in Amsterdam, as well as Radboud University, Delft University of Technology, and HAN University of Applied Sciences. Alongside her exhibition here at the ART SCIENCE Gallery, she is also currently exhibiting in group exhibitions around the Netherlands, including Galerie Maurits van de Laar and Kunsthal KAdE. Prior, she has had solo exhibitions at Platform POST in Nijmegen, Galerie Maurits van de Laar in The Hague, and Kunstenlab in Deventer, among others.
Angela Roothaan is a tenured Associate Professor at the department of Philosophy at VU Amsterdam. Her research focuses on Intercultural and African philosophy, criticism of modernity, spirituality, and spirit ontologies She did her Masters in Philosophy at Leiden University, and her PhD in Philosophy at University of Amsterdam. She published on a wide range of subjects, such as Philosophy of Nature, Spirit Ontologies, Value Ethics and (early) Modern Philosophy, before turning to African and Intercultural philosophy. In recent years she has become an expert in this field, supervising multiple PhD projects and initiating various scholarly networks with a focus on African and Intercultural Philosophy. After publishing her book Indigenous, Modern and Postcolonial Relations to Nature. Negotiating the Environment (Routledge 2019) she now works on an annotated re-translation of Bantu Philosophy by P. Tempels, and collaborates with an interdisciplinary network of scholars to contextualize this classic text of African Philosophy.
André van der Braak is a professor of Comparative Philosophy of Religion at the Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities, Lived Religion and Society at VU Amsterdam, where he is also the director of the MA programs at the Faculty of Religion and Theology and leads the research group Transformations of Religiosity. His research centers around the transformations of religion in the contemporary philosophical landscape, with current projects focusing on the encounter between non-Western spirituality and Western modernity. In 2023 he published the book Ayahuasca as Liquid Divinity: An Ontological Approach. In addition to his academic activities, he is also a Zen teacher at Zen in Baarn.
Programme
4.00 PM | Doors open & possibility to view exhibition
4.15 PM | ART SCIENCE dialogue with speakers and audience
5.15 PM | Closing
Admission is free