Welcome to the online catalogue

Welcome to the LIMA Catalogue. Here you will find over forty years of media art and over two thousand works by five hundred national and international artists. Offered here are narrative and medium-specific works, performance registrations from emerging artists to Marina Abramovic, Jan Fabre, The Vasulkas, Nan Hoover and Dutch pioneers as Livinus van der Bundt and Peter Struycken. 

In June 2018 Mediakunst.net was launched. Mediakunst.net is home to the complete media art collections of the Frans Hals Museum, Van Abbemuseum, Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, the Cultural Heritage Agency of the Netherlands and LIMA. Visitors to Mediakunst.net can create an account and freely browse the affiliated collections. Visit www.mediakunst.net


Insight (2012), Sebastian Diaz Morales, 12'00''

We look at a film crew; the film crew is watching us. Cinema as a mirror of reality that becomes fiction. Or is it vice versa? A world with a mirror image, one that can be accessed by crossing the mirror’s surface. Indeed, within the realm of fiction, mirrors provide characters and readers alike with a gateway to a different world. Interaction with that new environment, be it purely fantastic or disturbingly didactic, pushes one to expand one’s horizons and reconsider the concept of a real world.

I/Eye (1993), Bill Spinhoven (video documentation)

Although we are generally unaware of it, our daily comings and goings are constantly being monitored by cameras and other surveillance-equipment: whether we're in a bank, at an airport, in a museum or a supermarket, our presence is being registered and checked-out practically round-the-clock, as if we were all potential criminals. Big Brother is watching you, or rather peeping surreptitiously at you - the interactive 'I/Eye' however, gazes at you quite openly with the naked eye. 'I/Eye' is a giant eye that fills the entire screen of a video monitor.

Impressions (1978) Nan Hoover, 10'24''

A long, narrow streak of light falls across the screen, a hand plays through it. Now the light is broken by the volume of the hand, then again the light remains intact. The spot of light becomes an object that can be lengthened by means of the index finger. One would think that the finger writes a ray of light. A drawing by Rembrandt has had a decisive influence on Nan Hoover's work. It is therefore not surprising that light and the human body became important themes in her work.