Alexandra Crouwers (b. 1974, The Netherlands) is a visual artist and artistic researcher who negotiates real-world ecosystem collapse through virtual environments. She uses digital tools – such as 3D animation, photogrammetry and simulation – as mediators between time, space and ecologies, searching for ways to escape anthropocentric perspectives and rethink human / non-human relations. At times, the results are equally absurd as they are tragic.
Her work centres on films and video installations, but extends to GIFs, emoji proposals, augmented reality, 3D-scanned objects, audio compositions and text-based experiments. Working with digital media, she constructs speculative metaphorical spaces that function as both sites of memory and imagined futures, bridging environmental history, post-human landscapes and technological mediation.
Through her doctoral research project, Summoning a Forest, she examines the intersection of digital tools and ecological transformation, using the loss of a former family forest that fell victim to a climate-driven bark beetle infestation, as a case study. This project investigates how technologies can be used to (re)connect with natural environments by creating new narratives around other-than-human entities.
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Alexandra Crouwers studied painting at AKV St. Joost in Den Bosch (The Netherlands) and graduated as a master of fine arts at the Sandberg Institute in Amsterdam in 2001. In 2004 and 2005 she followed Filmstudies & Visual Culture at the University of Antwerp.
She is currently a Ph.D researcher at Leuven University / LUCA School of Arts in Brussels, Belgium, as part of the Art & Society and Art & Recollection research clusters at LUCA School of Arts / KU Leuven. The Ph.D is supervised by Wendy Morris.
Over the years her practice has been awarded stipends by Fonds BKVB (now Mondriaanfonds), BKKC (now Kunstloc Brabant), Kunsten & Erfgoed (Government of Flanders), Tijl Fonds (Prins Bernard Cultuurfonds), Kunstloc Brabant, and deBuren (Brussels).
Crouwers is a member of the committee for individual artist’s grants of the Flemish Community of Belgium, and a board member of the Corso theatre in Antwerp.
Since 2021 Crouwers uses NFTs (Non-Fungible Tokens) – on the Tezos blockchain – as a partial solution to the archiving, distribution, and both conceptual and financial validation of digital art pieces. She lives and works in Antwerp, Belgium.
Recent exhibitions include Ludwig Museum, Budapest (‘Smaller Worlds. Diorama in contemporary art‘, HU, 2022), Technische Sammlungen, Dresden (‘Hydromedia: Seeing with Water’, DE, 2024-25), 38CC, Delft (’16UP’, NL, 2024), Museum M, Leuven (‘Time and Again’, BE, 2022), and a solo exhibition at Collectie De.Groen in Arnhem (‘NGMI’, NL, 2022). Other projects took place online, such as ‘Down the Silicon Meadow‘ (Office Impart, Berlin, DE) and ‘Who is online? Game art in the age of NFTism‘, VirtualHEK, Haus der Elektronischen Künste, Basel (CH).
Films were screened at the Conjuring Creativity Conference (London), Uppsala Short Film Festival, Go Short (Arnhem), Transmediale (Berlin), Impakt (Utrecht), Portable Film Festival (Australia), Microwave festival (Hong Kong), Rotterdamse Schouwburg, Berwick Film & Media Arts Festival, Woodhorn Museum (Ashington), Toffee Factory (Newcastle), Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art.
Her research activities span academic conferences, artistic research publications, lectures, and international residencies.
She presented at academic and artistic platforms, including VSAC / Visual Science of Art Conference (2019), FilmEU’s Future Visions Pre-Congress (2020), EARN/Smart Culture Postresearch Condition (2021), and the Digisoc Unconference at BAC Leuven (2022). She has contributed to peer-reviewed publications such as VIS Journal for Artistic Research and Forum+.
As a guest lecturer, she has delivered courses and talks at LUCA School of Arts (Brussels, Genk, and Ghent), KdG Advanced Master in Digital Cultures, Academie Noord, and Art Lab Gnesta (Sweden), among others. Her Digital Dimensions course (2021–2022 in collaboration with Guido Devadder), explored the evolving role of digital developments in animation and film.
Crouwers has also engaged in panel discussions and symposiums on digital art, NFT culture, and post-human narratives, participating in events such as NFT feed at Oddstream. Additionally, she has held international research residencies, including at Residency Unlimited in New York (2020) and Art Lab Gnesta (2023).
Her contributions to theory and practice continue through advisory roles for master’s paper at LUCA, lectures on research methodologies in the arts, and public discussions on digital aesthetics and ecological speculation.
Download full CV (txt document).
(…) “we’re living through the biggest thing that’s happened since human civilization emerged. One species, ours, has by itself in the course of a couple of generations managed to powerfully raise the temperature of an entire planet, to knock its most basic systems out of kilter. But oddly, though we know about it, we don’t know about it. It hasn’t registered in our gut; it isn’t part of our culture.
Where are the books? The poems? The plays? The goddamn operas?
(…) I mean, when people someday look back on our moment, the single most significant item will doubtless be the sudden spiking temperature. But they’ll have a hell of a time figuring out what it meant to us.”
Bill McKibben, “What the warming world needs now is art, sweet art”, grist.org, 2005.
