Darly Benneker (1992, Colombia) is a Dutch-Colombian visual artist and curator based between Antwerp and Copenhagen, whose practice is deeply shaped by site-specific research. She holds an MA in Education in Arts (2020) from the Piet Zwart Institute in Rotterdam and an MFA in Sculpture and Expanded Practices from the National College of Art and Design (2024) in Dublin.
Working across installation, sculpture, writing, and video, her practice reimagines physical and emotional spaces and objects as extensions of a fictional past. At its core is an exploration of home and belonging, and the tension between feeling at home in unfamiliar environments and questioning what “home” might mean.
Her work approaches migration not only as a socio-political reality, but also as an aesthetic and material process through which memories, objects, and identities move across borders. Following the movement of plants and people, she traces botanical and material trajectories, including native and invasive horticulture, as traces of displacement, encounter, and transformation. Attentive to the tactility and poetics of matter, she creates imagined homes and speculative environments for possible future forms of life, where familiarity and estrangement, reality and fiction, meet.
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She has exhibited in groupshows at institutions such as The Douglas Hyde Gallery (Dublin), The Complex (Dublin), and Ribrotterdam (Rotterdam), and has contributed to projects, exhibitons and performances at Kunstinstitute Melly, Gallery MaMA, TENT Rotterdam, Staatsgalerie Karlsruhe- alongside artist-run spaces such as T-Space (Antwerp) and Soup (Rotterdam). Her upcoming solo exhibition will take place in April, 2026 at MORPHO in Antwerp.
She received grants from the Prins Bernhard Cultuurfonds (2023) and Fonds Kwadraat (2024), and was awarded support from the Dutch embassy in Belgium (2025) for a forthcoming project centered around the botanical gardens, greenhouses and the history of the rubbertree in Medellín, Colombia.
Alongside her artistic work, she works as an assistant curator at Kunsthal Extra City in Antwerp and the Belgian Pavilion for the 61st Venice Biennale (2026). She also works as an external critic in the Fine Arts department at St-Lucas School of Arts in Antwerp.
Contact details:
darlybenneker1992@gmail.com