We could not be more excited to share this news: Amsterdam is gaining a new museum! The Drift Museum, opening in early 2025, is founded together with the owner of the renovated listed building Van Gendt Hallen, Eduard Zanen.

Our space-filling artworks, and performative installations will be enhanced by the grand and industrial character of the Van Gendt Hallen; five factory halls in the centre of Amsterdam designed by architect Dolf van Gendt in 1898.

The Drift Museum is the outcome of everything we have been working towards for the past 17 years. We hope it will be a place that generates wonder and emotional responses from our visitors and where they feel more connected to our planet and nature.

We cannot wait to welcome you all! Until then, keep an eye out on www.driftmuseum.com. 

X Lonneke & Ralph

Photo by Valentina Vos

We are taking part in the exhibition Flower Power at The Musée Des Impressionnismes Giverny which was previously on show at Kunsthalle Munich.

The show is an unprecedented exploration of the power of flowers, from Antiquity to the present day. DRIFT’s Fragile Future will be exhibited alongside masters such as Monet, Cézanne and Andy Warhol.

The exhibition opens on September 29.

The premiere of our collaboration with the National Dance Theater of the Netherlands takes place this month on September 21st. Lonneke Gordijn has developed a new site-specific work for this theatrical performance. The choreography of the work is currently being formed on location in The Hague, together with the choreography of the dancers and the music. Click here for tickets.

The annual TED conference in Vancouver is an event during which prominent experts across a wide range of fields are invited to share their ideas with the world. As a viral video phenomenon, TED attracts an enormous and influential audience. This year, TED invited DRIFT’s Lonneke Gordijn to participate in their yearly program to talk about the development process of their studio’s artworks.

The New York City Ballet presents their tenth annual Art Series, where they invite a contemporary artist to create a site-specific work which will be displayed during their winter performance season. This year it is DRIFT’s signature work Shylight that will be on view in the lobby from January 17 through February 26, with open hours for the general public as well.

Coded Nature explores the relationship between humans, nature and technology. An autonomously flying swarm of DRIFT blocks responds to the movement of the audience, reflecting the endless opportunities of creation in nature as well as a continuous flow of change. The work was unveiled and shown to public for the first time, at Art Basel Miami 2022.

The work illustrates how humans strive to live autonomously within sets of societal rules and conventions, and challenges the human concept of freedom. If every bird were to operate on its own, the ultimate result would be chaos. Just like birds, people find safety in being part of a group. As such, their actions must be aligned with collective mechanisms and are compelled to follow a set of rules based on which society functions. If one chooses complete individual freedom over societal effort then one can only operate aside from it, which makes us question: What is the perfect balance between the two? Is freedom an illusion?

This year Art Basel Miami celebrated it’s 20th anniversary. For this special occasion, DRIFT’s award winning drone sculpture Franchise Freedom returned to the city after it premiered there in 2017. In collaboration with Art Basel, the artwork flew above the Convention Center for two evenings in a row, both visitors from the art fair and citizens enjoyed the memorable performance.

19 NOV 2022 — 30 APR 2023

DRIFT’s exhibition at the Philadelphia Museum of Art is now on view till April 2023. In this exhibition are several artworks of DRIFT exhibited, with our signature work Fragile Future as the center piece. The exhibition also explores how our artworks come to life. Drawings, models, prototypes, and other documents of the studio’s experiments offer glimpses of the research and engineering that lie behind the apparent effortlessness of our experiential creations. Go check it out for your self.