Notes on Hapticity currently has three core members: Hannah Dawn Henderson, Elena Kostenko, and Kees van Leeuwen. Scroll down to read more about their respective practices.

Hannah Dawn Henderson
Hannah Dawn Henderson (1991) is a cross-disciplinary artist, writer and researcher. From a Scottish-Jamaican background, Hannah Dawn has been based in The Hague (NL) since 2012. She is a graduate of the Royal Academy of Arts, The Hague, and an alumna of the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten, Amsterdam. Through films, printed matter, essays and curatorial projects, she explores archival forms (institutional, communal and personal) and memory-making processes in relation to diasporic and broadly non-hegemonic positionalities.

Hannah Dawn has exhibited in The Netherlands and further afield, including contexts such as the Rotterdam Kunsthal (NL), Queer Arts Festival Antwerp (BE), Haus n Athens (GR), and the Experiments in Cinema Festival (Albuquerque, USA). She has been published by Book Works (UK), Volume Magazine (NL), and Koninklijke Boom with the Royal Netherlands Institute of Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies (NL), amongst others.

She has pursued archival research projects at the Wilberforce Institute for Study of Slavery and Emancipation with the Hull History Centre (UK) and the Nieuwe Instituut (NL), and has presented at symposia including Disclosing Futures: Rethinking Heritage (2022, organised by Nieuwe Instituut, Rotterdam), Uncertainty Seminar: Shadows of Tomorrow (2019, organised by Stroom, The Hague), and Archival Interactions: Performing Intersectional Counter-Archives (2022, organised by the The Critical Visitor with the DAS Graduate School, Amsterdam).

In addition to individual artworks housed in private collections, her written work is held in library collections including the Joan Flasch Artists’ Book Collection (SAIC, Chicago, USA), TATE library (London, UK) and the Bard College Center for Curatorial Studies (New York, USA).

Elena Kostenko
Elena Kostenko (1983) is a visual artist and researcher, born in Semipalatinsk, Kazakhstan, a city known as Dostoyevsky’s place of exile and a Soviet nuclear test site. She began her artistic journey at the Fine Arts Department of Herzen University in Saint Petersburg, where she honed her skills in traditional painting, including an in-depth study of the Old Masters. Upon moving to The Netherlands, she discovered the entirely new realm of Western contemporary art. To understand its cultural context and history, she pursued further studies at the Rietveld Academy (Amsterdam), Royal Academy of Arts (The Hague), and Leiden University. Since 2020, she is based in France and is currently living and working in Paris.

Her current practice spans diverse forms, including mid-length films that apply an experimental approach to documentary-making, analogue photography, ceramic sculptures, and socially-engaged activities (workshops, lectures). She has presented her artistic and research projects in various venues, including L’institut national supérieur de l’education artistique et culturalle (Guingamp, FR), the ROOTS Film Festival (The Hague, NL), WORM (Rotterdam, NL), PrintRoom (Rotterdam, NL), and The Hague’s Municipal Museum (NL). Besides her artistic practice, Elena has also taught Western contemporary art at the Guangzhou Academy of Art in China for several years.

Since 2022, as a response to geopolitical turbulence, she has been hosting an online community: Attention!, that aims to foster connections among Russian-speaking cultural actors around the world and to stimulate intercultural dialogues through artistic actions.

Kees van Leeuwen
Kees van Leeuwen (1986) is a visual artist and researcher based in Haarlem. His work explores the interaction between architecture, space, and human experience. He has a Bachelors degree in Fine Arts from the Gerrit Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam and a Masters in Artistic Research from the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague. His multidisciplinary practice encompasses sculptural installations, photomontages, and research projects.

Kees’ artistic practice is deeply engaged with the political, architectural, and cultural implications of space and the ways in which people experience social codes and cultural contexts. His work reflects on the physical and cognitive challenges posed by spaces and their connections to rituals and protection. His works have been exhibited nationally and internationally, including exhibitions at OMI (Rotterdam, NL), Yamanaka Suplex ANNEX (Osaka, JP), Matsūra Historical Museum (Hirado, JP), Cave – Ayumi Gallery (Tokyo, JP), and Framer Framed (Amsterdam, NL). In 2018, he was amongst three artists nominated for the Young Monument Talent Prize.

Additionally, he is the author and co-author of several publications on cultural heritage in the Netherlands, particularly related to the Cold War period. These include, In Case of Emergency: Underground bunkers for the government during the Cold War period (published in 2021 by the Netherland’s State Service for Cultural Heritage), and Hiding in The Hague (published in 2017 by De Nieuwe Haagsche). Further, Kees has presented lectures at venues including The Netherland’s embassy in Tokyo, Frascati Theatre (Amsterdam, NL), and PrintRoom (Rotterdam, NL).