Aubane Berthommé Martinez is a multidisciplinary artist who uses self representation and intersectional analysis. Her work explores contemporary proletarian identities while deconstructing power dynamics. She works across painting, ceramics, photography, garments, exhibition making, and sculptural installations. Her artistic practice began with an exploration of gender identity and sexuality, using her body as both concept and medium. Today, her work honors her [working] class and [Mediterranean] diaspora, reclaiming and reanimating visual languages that are often exoticized, romanticized, or dismissed. The performative dimension of her practice shapes how these mediums are encountered, with the body, intimacy, labor, and the gaze remaining central terrains of negotiation. Her use of kitsch, ornamentation, and colorful excess is not ironic or distanced. She reclaims gendered and proletarian aesthetics with honesty and passion, investing in pleasure, sentimentality, and material beauty as forms of knowledge, connection, and resistance. Her work remains critical, humorous, and seductive, bringing tenderness and sensory pleasure within political discourse. Her curatorial practice unfolds through Kapish, the platform she directs, conceived as a continuation of her research. Exhibitions and public programs are approached as relational ecosystems shaped by care, class consciousness, and embodied politics, deliberately blurring the boundaries between art, pedagogy, and community space.
RAMA residency
Research and production residency
ZVONA i NARI residency
Literary residency + publications
Broken Hearts (Kapish)
Broken Hearts was a two-day gathering of performances and encounters circling heartbreak in its many forms. Not only romance, but also rupture, exhaustion, political grief, and quiet disillusionment.
Four performances move through different registers, from ritual to intimacy, from humor to release. With Valentina Vella & Lisa, Michel Wang, Qiao Chu Guo, Ahmad Mallah & Rebecca Lilith Krüger.
On June 7th, a market of local makers offered small comforts, distractions, and gestures of care.
Seeking Venus - Nuptial Revival (performance)
An exploration of gendered care, domestic labor, and inherited obligation through ritual, endurance, and audience interaction.
As physical and ethical weight shifts onto the artist's body, beauty and strain coexist in a choreography of intimacy, tension, and repair.
Cucumber Temple (Performative installation)
An intimate beauty salon becomes a site where visual art, care practices, and manual labor intertwine.
Activated through touch, attention, and exchange, the work invites visitors to experience closeness and shared care as a political and sensorial encounter.
Sapphic Utopias (Multidisciplinary exhibition & festival)
Sapphic Utopias is a month-long program unfolding during Pride Month at Time is the New Space, dedicated to creating and exploring spaces—both conceptual and physical—that center sapphic identities. Rooted in the historical absence of sapphic people from male-dominated cruising cultures, this project reclaims intimacy, sexuality, and storytelling through a feminist, queer, and anti-capitalist lens. We aim to build a tender, experimental environment where sapphic individuals and gender non-confo
Tender Connection - Nature love
Sensorial writing workshop and plant massages
Tender Connection - Loved ones
Sensual and sensorial writing workshop
Faux-Pas (Multidisciplinary exhibition & festival)
Fashion Faux-Pas marks the first collaboration between Oud House and Stichting Kapish (Squish + Kollection Kitsch). Taking place in the heart of Bospolder-Tussendijken (BoTu), this joyful and experimental cultural program explores how we express ourselves, how we're seen, and how we relate to one another—through clothing, craft, and care.
SMC BIPOC shorts - Deep touches (Move screening & spoken words)
Film screening & Spoken words
Untitled exhibition
Seeking Venus - The end has no end festival
This is a Happening
Collective performance developed during the Rule of X residency.
Tales of resistance (Queer Cinema - SMC)
On November 25th, in honor of the International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women, LantarenVenster and Squish invite you to a special Queer Cinema event. Through a diverse lineup of films, we'll explore the fight for gender rights with a range of tones and genres—from sharp satire to powerful revolutionary narratives. Each film of fers a unique perspective on resilience, resistance, and empowerment, highlighting feminist and queer voices.
Fem Disturbances
GRAW 2024
Crafting Futures - Queering cultural heritage
Kollection Kitsch #7 Bling Bling
Flux
LOOM
Pissprelude
Glass Cages - A surreal vision
The economy of tenderness (W139 Hosts)
History Happens Now
Beauty Salon
Mediterranean garden
We are here: all year round!
Kollection Kitsch #5 The politics of polishing
Seeking Venus
Kollection Kitsch #4 Cut the mustard
Kollection Kitsch
Kollection Kitsch is an exhibition space melting with Wunderbar where artists, curators, neighbors and art lovers can come together to enjoy art over a drink. The exhibitions last for 3 months and focus on a different theme. Small format artworks are on sale for 10 euros in a customized candy machine.
Exhibitions & Performances 2022
-Free the Kitsch - Athens Filmfest, Interferences - Kino 28, Athens (Greece)
-Check the Mic, KeileCollectif, Rotterdam (NL)
-KARMAKLUBB* + PHOTOGRAPHY DAY, Preus Museum - Norway's National Museum of Photography, Horten (Norway)
-Untitled performance, Oliver Doe, Slash Gallery, Rotterdam (NL)
-A charmed life, Transmission gallery & Short supply (UK)
-Too fem for art, Wunderbar, Rotterdam (NL)
-Collection Kitsch: Visual identity & graphic design
-Large Art Calendar, Rotterdam (NL)
Squish Radio
Squish radio is an organic spontaneous open mic program featuring queer and LGBTQIA+ people from the local creative scene. Each of the three hosts developed series of sessions tackling themes they have at heart.
Aubane will introduce and interview visual artists and performers. Besides this casual and intimate program, she will run Blanket Huts, a series of podcasts gathering researchers and creatives to discuss topics concerning queerness, genders and sexualities.
Let me wear socks in my velvet high heel sandals
Solo exhibition and portrait making every Saturday and Sunday
Collective Exhibitions & Performances 2021
-Queer photography: a non-definitive survey, SEAS, Brighton
-Dirty Palace, Studio CARE, Rotterdam
-Expo Pink, Pink screens festival, Cinema Nova, Brussels
-Pandora's box, International Women Theater Festival, Frankfurt
-Queens of marmalade: Art & music mini festival, Studio Cool, Rotterdam
-GRRL Telephone, GRRL Haus, Berlin
-The face of the other: Collective exhibition, SEAS, Brighton
-The queer & now, Queer spectra art festival, Salt Lake City
Solo exhibitions 2021
-Le sens de la fête: Solo exhibition, Bar3, Rotterdam (Netherlands)
-Let me wear socks in my velvet high hell sandals: Solo exhibition, Studio Cool, Rotterdam (Netherlands)
Squish
Squish is a queer and feminist cultural organization supporting emerging artists and culture makers. The platform organizes various research based multidisciplinary events.
Exhibitions & Performances 2020
-Touch: Collective exhibition (online), bG Gallery & Gesalt Projects, Santa Monica (USA)
-Back to Squishness: Collective exhibition, WORM, Rotterdam (Netherlands)
-Strange Love Avant-lentine: Performance & solo exhibition, The Performance Bar, Rotterdam (Netherlands)
Exhibitions & Performances 2019
-Pas de Pantalon: Live painting performance,The Performance Bar, Rotterdam
-Myths of the near future: Design of visuals, The Performance Bar, Rotterdam
-Borders and Boundaries: Design of visuals, The Performance Bar, Rotterdam
-Beyond Borders: Collective exhibition, VeniceLands Artprize, Trevisio (Italy)
-Start up: Unsettled Tentions: Collective exhibition, Nieuw Dakota, Amsterdam
-Shadows: Collective exhibition, Loosenart Gallery, Rome
Exhibitions & Performances 2018
-KONTRA Festival: Participative live photography, Little Red Riding Hood, Rotterdam (Netherlands)
-A Small Part of Everything: Collective exhibition, Fijnhout cultural center, Amsterdam (Netherlands)