August 1, 2025

Curator-in-Residence 2026: BABY RENI

We’re very excited to share that Baby Reni has been selected as our first A Tale of A Tub x Amarte curator-in-residence, the moniker of Vietnamese-Dutch artist and designer Irene Ha. In deconstructing fashion conventions from an artistic standpoint, her work draws connections between the contemporary culture she grew up in and the traditional customs of her Vietnamese heritage. In this way, Ha celebrates Diasporic Southeast Asian pop culture through kaleidoscopic assemblages, installations and performances—recalibrating everyday diasporic objects, trinkets and interiors while parodying fashion aesthetics and brand identities. Working in the tradition of artists who critically engage with the strategies of luxury brands and their cultural institutions, she operates at the intersection of commerce, identity and cultural infrastructure.

Alongside her art practice, Ha has run Baby Reni Foundation since 2023, a fictional-but-functioning institution operating out of her own living room, staged as a parody of Western post-war art discourse and the white cube. Drawing on her fashion background to explore things like branding, trend, merchandising and arts patronage, Baby Reni offers a really unique and exciting perspective on curatorial practice, thinking mediation, (self-)financing and methodology from the domestic setting of her own living room. As A Tale of A Tub is itself situated in a residential context, we are excited to further explore together what domestic settings can mean for an art institution and the audience that literally lives around it. The residency also welcomes the first chance for Baby Reni to think about her multifaceted practice from the vantage point of an emerging curator, having been mostly celebrated so far for her work as an artist (though, excitingly, she also hopes to complicate these distinctions even more while in residence).

Baby Reni will begin her residency this week and will be with us until the end of January 2027. On the very last day of the month, Baby Reni Foundation will open a pop-up exhibition at the Vleeshal Centre for Contemporary Art in Middelburg, transposing her thinking in one institution to a realisation in another. Off the backdrop of the apartment context of her research with us, and the role of domestic space in her practice more broadly, the two institutions will come together to celebrate ‘moving day’, connected through Baby Reni’s biography and a desire to occupy more networked forms of institutional support for the practitioners we work with.