Zippora Elders on Ulala Imai

In this new video, curator Zippora Elders discusses Ulala Imai’s exhibition CLOSE at the gallery (15 May—12 July 2025).

“Ulala Imai selects seemingly everyday objects and places them in her paintings, situating them in worlds she has encountered, as well as worlds she imagines. These objects become spirited in themselves, almost like portals to another world – or perhaps to a possible world – offering another way of seeing and being in the world.”— Zippora Elders

Zippora Elders is a curator, writer and art historian, based in the Netherlands and Berlin. She is Senior Curator at the renowned Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven, where she is developing programming about desire and change through staging, movement, performance and choreography, in the context of a museum, city and world in transition. Before she was the Head of Curatorial Department & Outreach at Gropius Bau in Berlin, the largest exhibition hall of Europe. Since 2016, she was the director of Kunstfort bij Vijfhuizen, a UNESCO fort and peninsula in the water defence line of Amsterdam; a heritage site and varied community that she lead as a retreat for contemporary art and ecological exchange under the themes of science fiction and enchantment, healing, fertility. Other previous appointments include a.o. curator at Foam Museum for Photography and curator-in-training at Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam. From 2019 until 2022, she was Co-curator for the iconic Sonsbeek quadrennial, in Arnhem, the Netherlands.