Hannes Bernard

Hannes Bernard (1985, ZA) is an artist, designer and educator based in Amsterdam. His practice is research-driven, but eclectic in form and medium — including writing and publishing, graphic, film and generative video installation, curatorial assemblage and interactive design. Bernard teaches Interactive Media Design at the Bachelor Graphic Design programme of the Royal Academy of Art, The Hague, and is a member of the KABK design lectorate’s Design and the Deep Future artistic research group.

Bernard is co-founder of the design collective, SulSolSal, which studies social and material intersections between Brazil and South Africa, and the uncharted visual ecologies of so-called 'developing' worlds. The collective is displaced between Amsterdam, Cape Town and São Paulo, and searches for ways of reorienting a predominantly Northern-gaze in art and design through new encounters with the Global South.

In 2016 Bernard received the talent-development grant from the Creative Industries Fund NL and was an artist-in-residence at the Jan van Eyck Academy in Maastricht. He designed and curated the exhibition, Staying Alive, for the 4th Istanbul Design Biennial. Most recently he displayed the media installation, o mundo/sem nós (the world/without us), at Kora Contemporary in Castrignano de’Greci, Italy. Bernard’s publishing includes ‘The Necessity of Unnecessary Things’ in Design Dedication (Amsterdam: Valiz Press, 2020); the AI-generated article, 'A Log is a Log is a Log’ in MacGuffin No.12 (Amsterdam, 2023) and ‘A Fray of Messays’ (Amsterdam: Metropolis M, 2025).

His ongoing research interrogates ‘the grid’ in graphic design and its displacement dynamics in the Global South as a site for critical inquiry, post-coloniality and design-futuring.

In possession of the Certificate Basic Qualification Didactic Competence and Examination (BKE).