What does it mean to live authentically in a world that does not always make room for you?
“Lives in Colour” provides an intimate glimpse into the different lives of the LGBTQIA+ community bringing together the works of three artists: Raisa Mulder, roni(a), and Nomi Mulders.
Bright rainbow colours are often a standardized language when expressing queer topics; however, ‘Lives in Colour’ takes a different approach. Working through drawings, documentary photography, and sculptural installations, the artists use darker palettes and contemplative forms to explore themes of identity, intimacy, care, safety, and belonging.
Identity is not simply something expressed but something continuously negotiated: through the body, through relationships, through the spaces we inhabit, and through the ways we are seen, or remain unseen.
“Lives in Colour” brings together three distinct artistic practices that each approach queer existence from a different perspective: self, space and body. Nomi Mulders explores the inner emotional dimension, reflecting on intimacy, vulnerability, loneliness, desire and the search for self-acceptance through figurative drawing. Raisa Mulder explores the social dimension by sharing a documentation of the diverse meanings of safety, belonging and community, by inviting LGBTQIA+ individuals to share the spaces where they feel most at ease, while simultaneously moving queer safety from merely awareness into something tangible and actionable. roni(a) explores the physical dimension questioning how bodies are maintained, disciplined, cared for and experienced through queer, trans and neurodivergent perspectives.
Moving through the interconnected themes of self, space, and body, “Lives in Colour” follows a journey of identity, belonging, and embodiment. Together, the works suggest that queer identity is not defined by a single experience, but by an ongoing process of care, connection, vulnerability, uncertainty, resilience, and becoming.
ARTISTS
Nomi Mulders - Grey SeriesNomi Mulders' 5 drawings trace an emotional journey from loneliness, invisibility, and self-doubt toward intimacy, tenderness, and self-acceptance. Her figures speak to the complexity of queer womanhood, exploring love between women, the sensuality of the female body, and the quiet process of embracing one's own identity. They also reflect on representation itself, acknowledging the artist's own experience of growing up disconnected from part of her mixed heritage and gradually reclaiming that aspect of herself.
Raisa Mulder - The Queer Library: A project into Queer Safer SpacesRaisa Mulder's “The Queer Library” shifts the focus from the individual to the environments that allow people to flourish. Through portraits and personal testimonies, participants identify places where they feel safe to exist as themselves. Their stories demonstrate that safety is neither universal nor guaranteed; it is emotional, relational, and deeply personal. Together, these works encourage visitors to consider how spaces become welcoming, who gets to feel at home within them, and what responsibilities we share in creating them.In their (they) photography–based work, queer people were invited to choose a place where they feel safe. In these spaces, they were photographed and asked about safety. Participants ranged from 19 to 79 years old, represented more than twenty nationalities, andcarried many different sexual and gender identities, backgrounds, bodies, and lived experiences.
Roni(a) - Maintenance is maintenance is maintenance is maintenanceRonia's sculptural practice examines care through the everyday routines of living. Drawing from queer, trans, and neurodivergent experiences, the work transforms ordinary acts such as washing, shaving, and eating into moments of reflection on the systems that shape our bodies and lives. Rather than viewing difference as something to be corrected, the work proposes care, repetition, and interdependence as ways of generating new forms of knowledge, embodiment, and belonging. Repetition functions both as structure and pressure: it can reproduce norms, but it can also sharpen awareness of how bodies are shaped through their environments. The body is both subject and material: it does not simply represent experience but actively generates and is shaped by it. Care is not framed as a response to deficiency or exclusion, but as a generative mode of relation in its own right.
𝗢𝗽𝗲𝗻𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗥𝗲𝗰𝗲𝗽𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻:
Sat, 25 July 2026 | 18:00 - 20:30 (Free)
Performance by roni(a) | 19:00
𝗗𝗮𝘁𝗲𝘀:
25 July – 2 Aug 2026 | 14:00 - 19:00 (3 Euro)
𝗩𝗲𝗻𝘂𝗲:
NGO DEI Gallery
Westeinde 25, 2512GS, The Hague