Hades was a powerful god in classical Greek mythology. His ‘Helmet of Darkness’ enabled him and the other gods to be invisible during their sometimes-ambiguous quests. Therefore, the helmet became proverbial for those who conceal their true nature... Digital platforms such as Uber, Amazon, Tinder and Airbnb, with their invisible Hades-esque algorithms, have drastically changed social structures and human behaviour — and not always for the better. They have given a completely new mea...

Flisvos is a Greek word meaning “the soft sound of a small wave gently hitting the shore”. When visiting the Greek island of Corfu in the winter of 2015, Mergaerts (BE) noticed that, in spite of the cold, many people were swimming at various places along the shoreline. She was impressed that the bathers — all adults, some of them retired — seemed to find peace in the Ionian sea. During the following years, Mergaerts learned more and more about the lives of the winter swimmers....

Debaltsevo, Where Are You? is a personal story about the fascinating and elusive search for your heritage. Karine Zenja Versluis (NL) started her own quest when she decided to explore her family history in the city of Debaltseve, Donbas, Ukraine. The place where her grandmother was born (Debaltsevo in her grandmother’s memories).

Everything went differently than expected, symbolizing the puzzling search for her own identity. A story told from different perspectives. We follow the history ...

A significant part of the work of artistic researcher Martin Tscholl (DE) involves walking through meadows, forests, and mountains. Here, he encounters a web of interconnections that extends far beyond the realm of humans. This web is inhabited by a wide variety of organisms, materials, and processes that are mutually dependent and in permanent change. By actively looking out for these other beings a correspondence between the human and the non-human spheres starts to unfold. In this process...

Event Horizon is constructed as a fictional narrative that immerses the reader in a nocturnal and mysterious atmosphere of anticipation. Instead of the carefree, light-heartedness with which one would usually associate childhood, Roland (BE) shows the gravity and mysteries that this period of life also involves. She depicts frozen and absent children as well as their ‘mental images’. Visions of the future, ­disturbing memories and strange dreams from the subconscious. A singular world wh...

How can we visualise people’s state of mind in times of confusion and transformation?

Some Way Out of Here by Jos Jansen (NL) explores a new and different way to represent the uncertainty of the era we currently live in. He sought the limits of lens-based image making in a manner that resonates with the fluidity of this theme.

Using a 3D LiDAR camera, known for its ambiguous and mysterious point clouds, he scoured the streets of Paris, Berlin and Amsterdam, capturing people lost in their t...

Nasser Road, Kampala is a mythical place known for its printing trade and as a centre of fraud. This publication draws attention to one of its main products: posters and calendars portraying politicians and well-known personalities as superheroes. The artworks are both decorative and political, telling the story of the common man’s struggle against the might of Western imperialism. Nasser Road is a collage of works by local designers and prints that Kristof Titeca (BE) collected since he be...

L.A. Vedute by Thomas Locke Hobbs (US) is a documentary study of domestic architecture in the city of Los Angeles. Standing on the property line of two apartment buildings with adjacent driveways, the space in between reminded Hobbs of a painting: The Ideal City of Urbino, where the illusion of space is achieved when receding lines that establish spatial relationships converge at a central vanishing point.

The work presents the way shared spaces recede to a common vanishing point, largely un...

The Long Way Home of Ivan Putnik, Truck Driver

is a collection of photographs and notes on the surroundings of remote Siberian roads and towns. Presented as an archive from a truck driver named Ivan Putnik, the photographs are actually made by various amateur photographers who uploaded the photospheres to Google Street View.

Fascinated by the visual variety, Vaste Programme (IT) recontextualized the images to create a fictional story. Apart from showing life in a remote area of the world, th...

Klara and the Bomb is a photographical and historical work that charts connecting threads between the invention of modern computers, the history of nuclear weapons and, in particular, the narratives of the women involved.

These interconnected stories are told through the little-known life of Klara von Neumann. As one of the first computer programmers, Klara’s story highlights the extent to which women were involved in the development of both computing and nuclear weapons from the 1940s onwa...