When Ruf peers out of the Hartwig Art Foundation’s new Proxy space in Amsterdam, she can see the building that will become billionaire Robert Defares’s private museum come 2028. For now, as director of his foundation, Ruf is developing a programme that has included a show by Coco Fusco and a Li Qihang video screened in a bus. The former director of the Stedelijk Museum took up her current position in 2020; her budget, for now, is mainly deployed to commission video and performance work that is then given or loaned to public institutions. Ruf backed Stan Douglas’s film Birth of a Nation (2025) for the Hessel Museum of Art, New York; Aria Dean’s work for Performa, New York; a performance by Julien Creuzet and Ana Pi for HKW, Berlin; and a new film by Ed Atkins and Steven Zultanski for Atkins’s Tate Britain survey. She also co-executive-produced Saidiya Hartman’s Minor Music at the End of the World (2025), a collaborative staging of writings by Hartman, a film by Arthur Jafa and contributions by Precious Okoyomon and Cameron Rowland. Her team already includes influential curators Diana Campbell and Lucia Pietroiusti.