Takayoshi Terajima’s necklace Portrait Jewelry engages with current debates on the power and impact of AI technologies. The work explores how portraits can be generated using AI based on personal data such as place of birth, eye colour and height; information also required for residence permits and passports. Although Terajima consistently provides the same input, AI produces a different image each time. This variation, the artist suggests, highlights the fluid nature of self-perception and identity. The work combines digital technology with artisanal craftsmanship and also relates to the long tradition of portraiture: from idealised paintings for the elite, to the seemingly objective medium of photography, and from there to today’s manipulated images created by software and AI. By using artificial intelligence, the artist relinquishes part of the aesthetic control to digital systems that generate socially desirable depictions of individuals, often without users consciously directing the outcome. The acquisition of this necklace aligns with CODA’s commitment to innovation and new technological development, where traditional craftsmanship and modern innovation complement and enhance one another.

Wall Necklace by the artist duo Pauline Boudry and Renate Lorenz consists of hanging chains often used to cordon off spaces, provide security, or restrict movement. The work of Boudry and Lorenz explores personal expression and self-representation within the queer community. For the duo, chains are like wigs: objects that balance between the functional and the decorative. Such objects, they suggest, enable us to move between different worlds, to step beyond the limits of tradition, and to imagine new forms of identity. Wall Necklace references the necklace, yet simultaneously operates as a spatial work embodying CODA’s interpretation of jewellery as a hybrid art form with social significance.

Zwaan and Boomstammen by Arno Kramer form two valuable additions to the artist’s existing presence within the CODA collection. CODA has followed Kramer’s development closely over several decades, not least because he continues to evolve and renew his artistic approach. In 2022, CODA presented the exhibition In Time, featuring more than one hundred of his drawings.

The exhibition also includes association flags created in 2022 by photographers Liesbeth Abbenes and Maurice Scheltens in CODA ExperienceLab, inspired by the exhibition The Showcase: Unboxing the CODA collection (October 2022-January 2023). With refined and meticulously constructed compositions, their photographs presented the CODA collection as it had never been seen before, revealing new ways of telling the stories behind individual objects and subcollections. In their photographs, Scheltens and Abbenes connected past and present, drawing inspiration from regional traditional dress, wooden ADO toys designed by Ko Verzuu, association flags, and parts of a Sparta nurse moped. These association flags were recreated by Scheltens and Abbenes in CODA ExperienceLab as a tribute to the artisanal textile craftsmanship once integral to the visual language of regional association flags. Following the exhibition, CODA acquired a burgundy-coloured flags for the collection, while Scheltens and Abbenes donated a yellow version.

Het Apeldoornsche Bosch

With the opening of the Apeldoornsche Bosch Memorial Centre in January 2020, the history of this Jewish psychiatric institution and its evacuation on the night of 21 to 22 January 1943 was given a permanent place of remembrance. The expansion of the Memorial Centre, inaugurated in January 2025, has further strengthened awareness of the site and its history. Since then, the collection relating to Het Apeldoornsche Bosch has grown, as people now bring objects from the former institution knowing they will be preserved by CODA. These are rare fragments of what remains of a once thriving community; links in a chain that can never again be complete. On view are photographs and everyday items such as cutlery, a bowl and a kettle, alongside personal documents such as the letters of Mona van Minden, a patient at Het Apeldoornsche Bosch, and the small sculpture Mina en Zwartje by Betsie (‘Bep’) Sturm-van den Bergh, a nurse at the institution.

About the CODA collection

With more than 12,000 objects, CODA holds the world’s largest museum collection of modern jewellery. CODA is also the only museum in the Netherlands with a distinct focus on paper art, rooted in the papermaking history of Apeldoorn and the Veluwe. The museum’s collection comprises over 30,000 objects and reflects a wide range of disciplines and crafts. Whether contemporary jewellery, visual art or regional heritage, many works belong to multiple subcollections at once. The CODA collection is a living entity in which current developments, historical narratives, social issues, traditional crafts and innovative techniques are interwoven. The collection continues to grow through acquisitions, long-term loans, donations and bequests. In addition, new works are regularly commissioned or added as a result of artist residencies at CODA ExperienceLab.