Kaus Australis Foundation is an artist-run organization initiated in 1985 by 4 visual artists. For several years accommodation was found in temporarily available city-harbour buildings which, one after another, were turned into suitable studio and presentation spaces. During this period Kaus Australis initiated a number of exhibitions and generously invited guest artists from different countries to share working and presentation space.

Starting from 1993, Kaus Australis had the opportunity to design and realize appropriate and long term accommodation, reflecting a more functional artistic space. The new building from 1997 is located at the Northern edge of Rotterdam and mainly composed of pre-fabricated materials. It shelters 10 large scale studios with abundant daylight, 5 on each side of a 40 m long drive-in corridor. The main entrance offers a well equipped kitchen, office, library and meeting place.  The 4 artists of the organizing team have their own studios inside the building. Team members do assist guest artists intensively on all levels of their profession but do not involve their own artistic work in the foundation. Four studios are continuously available for guest artists from here and abroad. These studios can be connected in order to function as an entire exhibition space. Guest artists stay for about 3 till 6 months; the foundation receives about 17 guests per year.

From 1997 Kaus Australis organizes an ongoing program by inviting professional guest artists from all over Europe and the rest of the world, showing artist’s presentations and from time to time large scale exhibitions or events.  In the past Kaus Australis maintained exchange programs for guest-artists with Barcelona, Cologne and Lille. Over the last years there are structural connections with Basel, Los Angeles and Tokio.

During RAiR#2 Kaus Australis will present an environmental mural in progress by the French artist Soizic Stokvis, in 2010 this elaborate work will be finished and launched.

Paintings of Soizic Stokvis question our environment. Most of her works are made on the premises. Canvasses and wallpaintigs mingle in works which propose a new approach of the exhibition space. The artist questions the material on which she intervenes in such way that walls while revealing lines reveal themselves in the same time. In Soizic Stokvis’s work right angle constructions are ever-present as they are in our daily life. Hence painting becomes the extension of architecture. Soizic Stokvis’s wallpaintings are mostly completed by a series of photographs on urban working sites or industrial landscapes.


In the Apartment-studio the Swiss artist Pascal Schwaighofer shows, in the middle of an informal working atmosphere, three intriguing glass-framed Body buildings. Further on during RAiR#2, Kaus Australis guides visitors around through the building and provides information about guest artists who recently or in the past did a residency. Saturday and Sunday visitors are welcome to taste home-made sweet-bites from an international kitchen.