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Rocco Enzo ter Haar
Amsterdam
2001

My family comes from a small town in the Catholic South of the Netherlands (Meerssen, Limburg); where rules of how one should behave are kept in check and, appearances of how one should look are kept neat and clean. As a kid, I felt this oppressive gaze and molding both in- and outside my grandmother’s house. These experiences leak into my practice today, which navigates the intersection of domestic spaces, queerness, and systems of social control. Working with glass, scent, and animation, my work frequently draws from Dutch cultural references, and interrogates how identity and power structures are shaped by illusions of purity, cleanliness and equality. I am interested in revealing the instability of these ideals and the violence embedded within them.

My works are often rooted in glass craft and its processes of materialization. The amorphous liquidity of glass becomes an important notion in my work, that seeps into other forms – whether it’s a dried-up fountain, a flooding, or an evaporated perfume. In my practice, glass shifting between states of matter becomes an extension of queerness and resisting conformity.

I remember the powerful olfactory sensation of incense clouding the entire church during my grandfather’s funeral service. Histories infused by scent become both personal and political. While at home as a teenager, I would indulge in the various perfumes my mother owned. Going to school however, I would wear the AXE deodorant “dark temptation”. It became a type of camouflage, perhaps unwittingly allowing me to hide my own queerness and deodorize. For me, smell became a transgressive tool and inherently queer medium that subverts normative understandings of space and (im)materiality. Smells penetrate and become a medium of power relations and regulating bodies.

Through recontextualizing and appropriating mass-produced everyday objects, it is often the sterility and cleanliness of bathroom and domestic scenes that are questioned. Cleanliness and odorlessness become synonymous; charged terms that reveal a political position of disguised neutrality. Cleanliness as violence. I work with sinks, curtains, and suburban lawns as not merely functional, architectural or decorative, but as coded objects or narratives that embody a heteronormative hegemony. These objects and cultural narratives are sometimes molded and mediated into digital spaces through animation. By transforming and re-molding the material into digital simulacra, the constructed nature of these coded environments surface. The tension between mold-made objects and a desire to transgress these molds, is central to my practice.

Glass blower, scent maker, video works, sculpture, thereminist and more.

Education

2021-2025: Gerrit Rietveld Academie, The Large Glass Department, Amsterdam

2023: Academic Exchange, VICARTE: glass and ceramic at Nova School and Bellas Artes, Lisbon

2020- 2021: Propaedeutic diploma University of Amsterdam, BA Spanish & Latin-American Language and Culture

2019-2020: Propaedeutic year of Scottish MA, The University of Edinburgh: History of Art and Chinese Studies

Exhibitons

2026: “De Nieuwe Generatie”, solo exhibition, Nationaal Glasmuseum Leerdam (feb 3 – march 15)

2025: Dutch Design Week x Rietveld, group exhibition

2025: PAKT foundation, group exhibition, “Residues, residues, residues“

2024: PAKT foundation, group exhibition “The rope ought to be taught dangling down the lion cage”

2024: Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, UNCUT group exhibition, “Techno diversity”

2024: Eight Cubic Meters Exhibition Amsterdam, Between the folds, collaboration with Ege Yılmaztürk

2023: Nationaal Glas Museum Leerdam group exhibition “When it’s too hot, a score starts to unfold”

2021: “Intimate Encounters”, group exhibition Rotterdam curated by Marlene Deutinger and Christopher Clarkson

Publications

2026 (forthcoming): “Finding a prostate”, written contribution (as addition to performance) in book Fuck Healing (?): The Insomniac Dreamers, in collective essay “Gut Feelings”. Edited by Bethany Crawford, Erica Biolchini, Bogna Bochinska and Dina. A Mohamed. Set Margins Press.

Last Updated 24.10.37

Rocco Enzo ter Haar

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Works Sculpture and Scent Animation and Video Selected Glass

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Works

Sculpture and Scent
Animation and Video
Selected Glass