About

(b. 1993, Lisbon) artist based in Rotterdam

In my work, I explore the (dis)comfort that emerges when humanity and technology meet. I'm drawn to the awkwardness of this encounter. I take a broad, material view of technology and my practice spans code, drawing, video, sculpture, and textile.

I'm interested in the tension between apparently opposing states and their (im)possible resolution: virtual and physical, nature and technology, on and off, light and heavy, day and night, nothing and something, nothing and not nothing, same and different, same and almost the same. This line of inquiry often leads me to the idea of inbetweeness. I don't see this as a form of compromise or neutrality, but as a point of friction.

My work is shaped by an ongoing negotiation between meaning and material. It is informed by the virtual but grounded in physical, process-based experimentation. I'm interested in how meaning shifts through systems – technical and physical; and how working within or against those systems exposes their limits.

Alongside my practice I teach a semester-long class of Interactive Media at Artez University of the Arts in Arnhem since 2022 and have given workshops at Willem de Kooning Academy (Rotterdam, 2022 & 2023), Werkplaats Typografie (Arnhem, 2023), Royal Academy of Art/KABK(The Hague, 2025) and Nieuwe Instituut (Rotterdam, 2024).

For exhibitons, projects or comissions contact me at velosoyara [at] gmail.com



Links

algorithmically numerical perfect digital corporeal, 2026 - handwoven double weave fabric (handdyed wool, cottolin), powder-coated steel photos by Tommy Smits, Robin Speijer

stills from the way things are going, 2022

Text
1 Yara Veloso (1993) is a multidisciplinary artist working with themes including technology, perception and materiality. With a background in programming, her practice is marked by an investigative approach in which digital and physical systems are not regarded as opposites, but as deeply intertwined. In earlier works, Veloso employed coding, video, web-based media and installations. Over the past year, she has turned her attention to textiles, and specifically to weaving – a medium that for her, functions as a new framework within which to further explore long-standing interests. Central to Veloso’s work is the question of how technology shapes our perception and our relationship with the world. She approaches this question holistically: computers do not exist separately from the body or from nature, but are made from tangible materials such as metal and silicon – derived from sand – that are extracted from the Earth. The loom is a precursor to the modern computer, as it likewise operates using a binary system that enables the reproduction of information. By working with this craft, Veloso underscores the historical connection between weaving and digital systems. Veloso reflects on the binary logic of computers – without a hesitant space in between – into weaving structures in which the front and back of the fabric form mirrored counterparts. Her installation Algorithmically Numerical Perfect Digital Corporeal (2026), in which the textiles are presented in steel frames, foregrounds the tension of the ‘in-between’ – an ambiguity that reflects the ecological entanglements between humans and computer systems.

Written by Kelly-ann van Steveninck, 2026
2 For a species in constant development; technology has always provided us with tools to tighten our grip on the world, to make sense of the chaos. Embodying human intervention, its history goes hand-in-hand with the evolution of language: from clay line and finger marks on caves, to cuneiform tablets, up to the written, and even the printed word. Technological advancements of the 20th century have diverted this human evolution in a way, by splitting our world into two parallel and reciprocal entities: the physical and the digital. A fascination with how this exponentially alters our consciousness and our way of being in the world, is at the root of Veloso’s work. Occupied with language and its structuring of our perception, she explores how thought-processes are rewiredthrough the fusion between mankind and computers.

Defying a moralistic stance, Veloso is rather intrigued by the awkwardness and clumsiness that sometimes occurs in this encounter. Like observing a first date where an attempted smooth kiss goes wrong, noses bumping into each other. Through humor, she casts a playful eye onto the constructed-ness of those systems that we all have come to take for granted. Systems we can no longer live without, systems we have internalised to the point that they are integral to our functioning. What logic has motivated these inventions? From a sober distance, and especially when in use by large groups of people simultaneously, these “solutions” of human engineering look ratherabsurd. Human evolution, high on a spiked cocktail of steroids. Perhaps the advancement is going too fast? (...)

Veloso considers technological add-ons as new extensions of our senses. They envelop and slowly suffocate us in a tightly wrapped filter. Being the new architecture of our society, they don’t only run parallel to the physical world, but are exceedingly intertwined with it. Weird-looking ergonomic inventions are another recurring motif in Veloso’s work, often blown up into grotesque proportions. A phone on our arm recording our heartbeat and itinerary whilst running, is turned into a bulky iPad strapped to the pillars of a building in Hug (2021). The ideal positioning for hands on a keyboard deviates into new iconography in the way things are going (2022), referring to John Ruskins’ statement that whilst drawing, a line should always have a destination. And so asks the artist, what direction are we going? From a distance and isolated from their everyday use, these inventions and rules look so random. Qwerty or Azerty? It’s all very confusing.

Excerpt from text by Evelyn Simons, 2023
3 Yara's interest in technology seems to be placed not on the conventional question of what it can do, but rather on how it contributes to how we access and assimilate the world. Looking at technology as it works rather than what it produces seems to be the angle with which Yara engages and develops her line of work. In her research, Yara often delves deep, taking it to an elemental basis, to build up from a basic, levelled line of understanding. Her work investigates technology as a coping mechanism with reality and demonstrates how it can act as a way to reveal the things that might lie beyond the first lines of understanding. Her work is often objective yet it is infused with a poetic feeling as she relates and makes connections between fragments of thought. Despite employing a reason-first approach, she makes space for poetry and the unexpected beauty found in how things come together (even if by chance).

Yara's work counteracts the conventional assumption that technology must work at the edge of progress to present new possibilities. As she demonstrates, technology even at the most rudimentary level (such as writing or doodling) can lead to a whole new range of awareness. Her latest video work takes the line as a starting point and expands on its significance as a unit of understanding. In the work, lines appear in the world, not as an object's static boundaries, but as a modulative, unfixed guide for assimilation. It is how the world appears at a given moment, but not as it stays. Yara's practice is just as modulative and open, as it continues to develop new methods of gathering and instilling knowledge, balancing positive ambition with -and as a way to cope with-the dreary reality.

Text by Mariana Lobão, 2022


CV

Exhibitions

Prospects
Group exhibition at Art Rotterdam, March 2025

I'm never doing this again,
Group exhibition with Sophie Allerding, Nabila Ernada, Mila Broomberg, Lucila Pacheco Dehne, Isabel Legate, Colette Aliman, Anna Bierler Rotterdam – September 2025

I can choose my own form
Solo presentation at Vlak, artist-run space in Rotterdam – May 2025

Open Studio (Groot Rotterdams Atelier Weekend)
with Anna Bierler at Het Archief, Rotterdam – September 2024

Phenomena
Group show with Isabelle Andriessen, Annabelle Binnerts, Aline Bouvy, Jim Campers, Max Hooper Schneider, Barbara Leclercq, Xavier Mary, Stijn ter Braak, Jenkin van Zyl, Nicolas Zanoni and Simon Hampikian curated by Elders Collectief, Kortrijk (Belgium) – March 2024

Al Dente
Group show with Micha Prinsen, Joost Vermeer Dagmar Pouwelse, Jelmer Konjo and Lana Mesić at W1555 Project Space, Rotterdam – February 2024

Meal Prep
Group show curated by Eva van Bemmelen at 2Walls, Amsterdam – January 2024

Phenomena 1.0
Group show with Simon Hampikian, Nicolas Zanoni, Xavier Mary and the Curator Machine, part of Wonder Festival and Kotrijk Art Weekend – Kortrijk (Belgium) – October-November 2023

Open Studio (Groot Rotterdams Atelier Weekend)
with Claire van Lubeek, September 2023

Table of Futile Evenings
Group exhibition, ISO Amsterdam – July 2022

the way things are going
Solo presentation at The Box, Werkplaats Typografie – June 2022

Zero Player
Group exhibition in collaboration with Fred Cave, Joe Cave, Sylvain Couzinet-Jacques Galerie du Crous, Paris – November 2021

Latent Space
Group exhibition Het Hem, Zaandam – September 2021

TOT HIER EN WEER VERDER
Group exhibition with Raquel Vermunt, Micha Prinsen, Maurice Meewisse, Joep Brouwer, Ivan Winter and Katinka van Gorkum, curated by Selma Hengeveld – Rotterdam, December 2020

What Happened to the Future?
with Vera van de Seyp at Kunsthal Rotterdam Comissioned by Poetry International – May 2019

Education

Forbidden Knowledge: Introduction to Esotericism
Winter School, University of Amsterdam, 2025

Werkplaats Typografie (Artez), Arnhem, NL
MA in Fine Arts & Design, 2022

Royal Academy of Art (KABK), The Hague
BA in Graphic Design, 2017

École Cantonale D’art de Lausanne (ECAL)
Exchange in Visual Communication – Spring 2015

Camberwell College of Arts (University of the Arts London)
Foundation in Art & Design – 2011 - 2012

Escola Secundária Artística Antóinio Arroio
Arts High School, Lisbon

Residencies

Masereel
Frans Masereel Centrum, Kasterlee, Belgium (2026)

Phenomena
Organised by DesignRegio Kortrijk & Elders Collectief, Kortrijk, Belgium (2023)

TOT HIER EN WEER VERDER
Three day residency and group exhibition curated by Selma Hengeveld, Rotterdam (2020)

Teaching

Interactive Media tutor
Artez University of the Arts, Arnhem, NL (2022 - now)

Guest Tutor
KABK / Royal Academy of Art, the Hague, NL (2025)
WDKA / Willem de Kooning Academie, Rotterdam, NL (2022, 2023, 2024)
Werkplaats Typografie, Arnhem, NL (2023)

Workshops
Nieuwe Instituut (2024)

Honours

Impulse & Deepening
2024/2025, Research grant, Centrum voor Beldende Kunst Rotterdam (CBK)

Artist Start
2024/2025, Stipedium for emerging artists, Mondriaan Fonds (NL)

Practical Grant
October 2023, Centrum voor Beldende Kunst Rotterdam (CBK)

Makersloket
2021/2022 project grant, Stichting Droom en Daad

Stipendium for Artist Initiatives
2019/2020 for Trixie The Hague (group), Mondriaan Fonds (NL)

Publications

Version Space
Kite in conversation with Yara Veloso and Alexander Tanazefti Edited by Angie Keefer and published by Library Stack, 2022

I can choose my own form, handwoven double weave (cotton, linen, wool),darning eggs, moth balls, 2025 Insert by Anna Bierler

Weaving circles (o) is difficult. You usually get eggs (0). To get the shape right, you shape from constraint, a work of adjustment. The persistent effort of noticing, testing, and trying again.
This kind of work has a name in computing. In 1947, computer pioneer Grace Hopper recorded "the first actual case of a bug being found" – a moth flew inside the Harvard Mark II, a computer larger than my bedroom. The insect's wings were blocking one of the holes (1) on the punched paper tape, disrupting the machine’s reading of the binary data. I wonder if it saw something behind the hole (1), or if it was the brightness of the paper (0) that attracted it. Either way, the word “debugging” was popularised to mean the work of finding and mending program faults.
Echoing in the work is the moth’s potential for destruction – of hardware, of textile or of itself: flying into the light, into its own demise. It is also in its tendency towards the breakdown of its own form that it heralds new beginnings – from an egg, to caterpillar, into its cocoon and into a moth, to an egg, to a caterpillar (…).

custom made handweaving assistant software (detail), 2025

Frue/Talse Portal, powder coated steel, 2023

Y/noes, powder coated steel, 2023

Ideal placement of fingers on a qwerty keyboard, wall painting, notepad pillows (the way things are going instalation), 2022


📖 Photos by Tommy Smits, Robin Speijer, Johanna Himmelsbach, Hilde Speet, Dieter van Caneghem

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