Gilleam Trapenberg

Born and raised in Curaçao, visual artist Gilleam Trapenberg (b. 1991) now lives and works in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. Orbiting his homeland, his creative projects look closely at the fabric of Curaçao’s social land- scape, probing at the island’s many paradoxes. He searches beneath the portrayals and tropes of Caribbean life that dominate (Western) media cycles, using the camera to create necessary counter-images.

Occasionally, though, Trapenberg is himself seduced by the allure of the exported picture-postcard; on European shores, nostalgia and longing take hold, perspectives drift, and memories of home are easily roman- ticised. For the artist, this experience of a perpetual limbo between two distinct places – connected by the fraught legacies of colonialism, endur- ing flows of goods and people, or even the mass tourism industry – is a growing focal point of his work.

A graduate of The Hague’s Royal Academy of Art, Trapenberg first moved to the Netherlands at 19 years old. In the years since, his works have been exhibited at institutions such as Foam Photography Museum and St- edelijk Museum Amsterdam, whilst his first photobook – Big Papi – was published in 2017. He was the 2020 recipient of Foam’s Florentine Riem Vis grant, and is one of prize winners of the 2023 Taylor Wessing Pho- to Portrait Prize. The works are currently exhibited at London’s National Portrait Gallery until February 2024.