Biography

Koen Oosterhuis (1998, Leiden) is a Dutch-Indonesian interdisciplinary artist working across music, film, and multimedia installations. His work explores fragility, identity, memory and the relationship between humanity and technology, often taking the form of immersive situations rather than linear compositions.

Oosterhuis draws on existential philosophy - most notably Nietzsche and post-Nietzschean philosophers - and on the layered history of his Indo-European heritage. He approaches creativity less as a linear, narrative process than as the creation of situations that audiences enter and experience, blurring boundaries between distinctions such as performer and audience, analogue and digital media, sound and space. Rather than offering explanatory frameworks, his work asks how presence, temporality, listening and experience are produced.

In his multimedia installation In A Space, the audience, spatial sound, and projected video formed a single environment, dismantling conventional concert hierarchies and placing the audience within the work, rather than before it as distant observers. The work reflects his ongoing interest in ritualised structures and the erosion of clear distinctions between subject and system.

His music and installations have appeared at Gaudeamus, November Music and the Grachtenfestival. Ensembles and musicians including the Antwerp Symphony Orchestra, the USC Thornton Symphony Orchestra, the Amsterdam Panflute Trio and ud virtuoso Jawa Manla have performed his work.

Oosterhuis studied Composition at the Conservatorium van Amsterdam and Musicology at the University of Amsterdam. Alongside his artistic practice, he teaches and develops creative software tools, extending his work into education and creative technology.