About
Julius Thissen (Son en Breugel, 1993) lives and works in Arnhem, The Netherlands. His practice explores community, representation, gender, and power, with a particular focus on transgender history and visibility from the final quarter of the 20th century to the present. Drawing from his own experience as a transmasculine person, his work aims to challenge the restrictive and often binary narratives imposed on transgender and queer individuals.
Working primarily through photography and a series-driven approach, Thissen creates narratives around the thin line between performing and failing. His work is increasingly future-oriented, imagining forms of existence beyond the social structures and limitations of the present. More recently, he has been moving towards installation-based forms of presentation, bringing photography, textile, sculpture, costume, sound, and spatial elements together to explore queer futurism and possibilities for queer and trans existence beyond established frameworks of visibility and representation.
In 2025, Thissen was nominated for FUTURES. In 2023, he received an Artist Basic Grant from the Mondriaan Fund, followed by an Artist Project Grant for his research project Bones of Graphene, Skin of Kevlar, which resulted in a solo exhibition at MU Hybrid Art House in 2026. He is currently working on an art commission at Delft University of Technology.
Artistic Research
Alongside his artistic practice, Julius Thissen develops artistic research projects through community-based exhibitions and public programmes that examine representation, visibility, and power within cultural institutions. His research is particularly informed by transgender and queer perspectives, and questions whose experiences, histories, and forms of knowledge are given space and legitimacy within the museum.
His projects have brought together artists, researchers, and communities to explore how institutional structures can be challenged and reimagined. In 2018, this resulted in the symposium WHY AM I HERE? at the Van Abbemuseum, following an artist residency organised by the museum in collaboration with Ali Venir. In 2021, Thissen was invited by Museum Arnhem to develop a public in-residence programme, which resulted in the group exhibition How Dare You Make Me Feel This Way (2022–23).
Selected exhibitions
MU Hybrid Art House Eindhoven, Frans Hals Museum HAL Haarlem, UNSEEN Amsterdam, UNFAIR ’22, Nederlands Fotomuseum, The Ulay Foundation, TENT Rotterdam, Showroom MAMA, P-OST Arnhem, Museum Arnhem, Garage Rotterdam, W139, Kunstfort bij Vijfhuizen, Metro 54, Art Rotterdam