To Touch The Sun is a group exhibition that invites audiences to take a critical look at a pressing crisis: the complex and layered spatial challenges currently facing the Netherlands. Fifteen works make up the exhibition – each taking this crisis as the starting point.
The first year students of the MA Photography and Society at KABK, in conversation with the Dutch journalistic platform De Correspondent, invite you to join our exhibition from the 9th to the 14th of June 2025. It will take place at Paradise, a new gallery located in the Hague, Groenewgje 136.
This crisis centers around competing — and often conflicting — priorities, including housing, energy transition, water management, recreation, economic development, public health, nature conservation, and biodiversity. While these tensions may remain largely invisible to the broader public, their urgenc is becoming increasingly undeniable.
Through varied visual languages and artistic strategies, the participating artists explore and interrogate these unseen pressures. The works reflect on the multiple dimensions of the crisis, offering alternative perspectives, subtle provocations, and space for dialogue.
Our collective work invites viewers to engage with the critical questions shaping the physical, social, and political landscapes of the Netherlands today — and to consider what role art can play in illuminating the unseen.
To Touch The Sun will feature a range of photographic, video, artistic works and installations by fifteen international image-makers from eleven countries including: Alberto Vidal Bernedo, Elena Krukonyte, Eva Chapkin, Fenna Jensma, Joanna Demarco, Julie de Ruijter, Khalil Döring, Mirko Pirisi, Marta Karkosa, Matteo Montaldo, Nadia Sheikh, Nikos Kapetanios, Odysseas Tsompanoglou, Raisa Durandi and Sara Ito.
Photography & Society is a two-year master’s programme at the Royal Academy of Art (KABK) in The Hague. The programme educates socially engaged photographers of the 21st century, who possess an active interest in the technological, political, environmental and social role of the photograph.
This project is an outcome of the MAPS1 Studio3 unit guided by Andrea Stultiens, Josta van Boxmeer, Bebe Agterberg, Jonathan Tang, Theo Baart, Dirk-Jan Visser, Jana Romanova and Ola Lanko.
Details:
Opening day: 9th June, Monday 18:00-22:00
Working hours: Week days: 14:00-20:00 Saturday: 11:00-20:00
Public events: Games night 12th June, Thursday 18:00 –22:00
Lunch and tour 14th June, Saturday 13:00 - 15:00
Elena Krukonytė
Body Energy Control
In 2019 I have experienced a nuclear disaster. My neighborhood in Vilnius was used as a filming location for HBO’s Chernobyl. Through media simulation familiar surroundings became a stage for catastrophe, making me question how nuclear power—rational and productive—can evoke fear, mysticism, and ideological tension. How do political and media narratives shape our perception of energy?
Now living in the Netherlands—a country shaped by water management and land reclamation—I reflect on the Borssele Nuclear Power Station, built in 1974 near the North Sea. In Lithuania, the Ignalina Nuclear Power Plant, with Chernobyl-type reactors, is being decommissioned. These nuclear power plants are monuments, both commanding and vulnerable, capable of turning territory into exclusion zones.
In April 2025, I encountered Gintaras Zinkevičius’ Lying at the “Post Ars” exhibition in Radvila Palace Art Museum. A polyptych of text and photographs shows the artist lying with a blanket and pillow in post-industrial spaces. What is a passive or active body in a photograph? Can presence be a form of energy? Inspired by ‘Lying’, I explore what I call “active lying”—a bodily practice that generates, manages, and circulates energy through presence. Yoga—derived from the Sanskrit word meaning “to yoke” or “to unite”—is a physical and mental discipline that links the body to the spirit. These autoportraits are performative act – the body, here, becomes a site of energy management, where presence itself is a mode of inquiry.
Eva Chapkin
Four corners, I’m The Fifth
How to make space when there’s no access to it? How to intervene in controlled space and stay there?
“Four corners I’m the fifth” follows the dissection of what we consider a room, a space, a place that contains. By dissecting such four corners how can we personify to get closer to it? To imitate it and integrate it into what we consider as spatial awareness. By placing one’s own face or familiar features, we grow closer to it, we start to get tender with it, we fill in intimacy with the eyes, and try to grow as the fifth corner in the room. I’m the space and the space is me, the corners surround me and I remain there as their own.
From what started as a study on the exploration of spatial and energetic control through visuals, a question arose on how to make space if it is not available. The space begins turning to the four focus points which draw you in and keep you locked, keep you aware, keep you warm.
How can you remain inside and become one of the corners and control that space by modifying, by speculating, by intervening?
Fenna Jensma
Zone of Toleration
The state of Dutch nature is among the worst in the EU. Despite ambitious national goals, policy implementation lags severely behind, due in part to political inertia and neoliberal mindset that fails to recognise the worth of what cannot be turned into economic gain. At the same time, across the country, countless citizen scientists are working to measure, protect and monitor biodiversity on a small scale. The data they generate feeds into official systems, yet their efforts alone cannot compensate for the lack of structural change. This project emerged from a critical hypothesis: that the growing number of grassroots citizen science initiatives in the Netherlands is a direct response to failing governmental structures around environmental protection.
Zone of Toleration asks: what does it mean if these efforts disappear?
The project is a speculative, fictional document ‘commissioned’ in 2065 by the Dutch Ministry of Climate Heritage. Set in the Anthropocene, in a ‘post-nature’ era, the document looks back on a group of citizen scientists who once dedicated themselves to the protection of Dutch flora and fauna. In this imagined future, both nature and the citizen scientist have vanished. The work weaves together fact and fiction, through research into these real-life initiatives and ecological data, and memory and imagination, to create a Post-Nature archive.
By adopting a future perspective, the project seeks to highlight the urgency of the present moment. It explores the tension between smallscale ingenuity and large-scale indifference and calls for reimagining systemic responsibility around environmental protection.
Joanna Demarco
To Capture A Butterfly
Over the last 134 years, butterflies in the Netherlands have declined by 84%, halving in population just between 1992 and 2023. Industrial farming is said to be the main cause of this decline. Data shows some 66% of land has been turned into land for industrial farming.
According to experts, butterflies respond strongly to change in habitat and are therefore excellent indicators of the quality of nature and land. Their absence tells us something is wrong.
Ironically, running parallel to this decline in butterflies has been an increase in the presence of “butterfly parks” around the country. Some are small private patches of land with the purpose of attracting butterflies to the spot, others are commercialised parks for which tropical butterflies are imported. The butterfly becomes a spectacle. All exist in controlled, designated, limited spaces which stand in contrast with natural habitats.
To Capture a Butterfly uses the camera as an attempt to document the insect and the environments they live in within these varying “habitats”– both natural and artificial.
The images draw focus on the anthropocentric elements of control and power within the parks – a metaphor for the larger forces at play in the natural landscape. Meanwhile, the attempt to capture butterflies by “waiting for” them in the wild through methods suggested by the European butterfly monitoring scheme, throws a spotlight on their absence and the need for us to adjust to nature’s sometimes unpredictable cycles.
Julie de Ruijter
A Flower is Not A Flower
Why are we trying to eliminate weeds so aggressively? What are the environmental and health impacts of doing so?
Fascinated by the power of weeds - plants that continue to grow in unexpected places, even breaking through asphalt and concrete - I wonder why cities spend millions to eliminate such resilient and beautiful species that contribute to biodiversity and have medicinal properties, only to replace them with cultivated plants maintained by herbicides. In this project, I explore my hometown Haarlem, known for having the highest density of concrete in the Netherlands, and document the presence of weeds through photography. By converting the images into negatives, where greens and yellows shift to purples and blues, I mimic how pollinators perceive plants, highlighting their vital role in attracting life amidst the urban gray.
Weeds, often overlooked, are essential for biodiversity: they provide food, shelter, and breeding grounds for countless insects and animals, sustaining fragile urban ecosystems. Through experiments with the practical uses of these plants, such as making skin oil from dandelions and exploring their use in anthotype printing, I emphasize their health benefits and the potential of common weed species.
My aim is to spark a broader conversation among citizens and policymakers in the Netherlands. By shifting our perspective on weeds, from unwanted growth to valuable resource, we can support biodiversity, reduce harmful interventions, and explore the health applications of native plants, from teas and oils to balms and food products.
Khalil Döring
Exhaust to Exposure
How is it possible to visualise something that our eyes cannot see? Through measurement, through documentation, through imagery. Cars are one of the major sources of toxic emissions in the Netherlands. Tiny polluted particles, once inhaled, travel through our airways, lungs, into our bloodstream and organs. The health effects are devastating. Measurement stations across the country provide live data, accessible for everyone, 24 hours a day. But society seems to be numb to numbers, graphics and colour palettes in weather apps.
This project offers a new approach. It is about making the invisible visible through a self-developed aesthetic approach that evolves over time. It is about time, about material, about reshaping function and the remaining question on how to depict air. The main element of the project is a former car exhaust pipe that was polluting for 15 years, which redefines its purpose as an object that captures traffic and the observer. Cut into pieces and equipped with an enlargement paper, it transforms into a camera obscura.
The exhibition offers a visual inquiry as well as a new critical reflection on the current situation of mobility and its risks for society. It features self-built cameras and the ultra-long exposure photographs they produced, which are framed within the original frames of deconstructed air filters.
Mirko Pirisi
All Matter(s)
You can find it everywhere in the urban space, from the sidewalks, to the streets and finally in buildings, both as a structural and decorative element. What’s so special about the brick?
During the 19th century the Dutch established a standard brick format called Waalformat, uniforming every brick produced in the Netherlands in order to better commercialise it. 21x10x5. A bit smaller than the usual sizes of that time. Why?
The clay in this region was particularly wet so a bigger size couldn’t have hold shape. The brick hence embodies a very specific feature of the landscape in which it is shaped.
This artistic research aims to unveil the code embodied in the Dutch bricks; a code that conveys meanings and information through a series of translations. Through the photographic medium and new technologies, this process takes us in a journey from wet clay to a modular element of the built environment.
Marta Karkosa
The Absence
It was a Saturday, 2 pm and I was standing in Den Haag Central Station with two huge suitcases, a backpack, and a piece of onion focaccia in my hand, given to me for free by the bakery downstairs from the building where I’d just lost my room. I was waiting for the FlixBus that would take me back home to Warsaw. I couldn’t believe it had come to this. I was homeless. I was leaving.
The Absence grew out from that moment. It’s a deeply personal visual project that explores spacial exclusion, rooted in my own experience with the Dutch housing crisis. After six months of relentless searching during which I moved four times and was rejected from 18 housing opportunities I was forced to leave the Netherlands. This experience became an archive of absence.
I created this work by turning the lens on myself. I photograph the spaces I was supposed to live in but never could through Google Street View, screenshots of listings, rejections, and images of my temporary homes, creating an “archive of exclusion”. I placed myself into these images, in front of houses, cutting myself from those places. I include fragments: self-portraits, half-packed suitcases, text messages marking rejections. The visual language is intentionally fractured and unstable mirroring the chaos I experienced.
I made this project to process my own story but also to create a space for those who have felt invisible, unwanted, or pushed aside. I want people who feel displaced, lost, or hopeless to know they’re not alone. It’s a question of who is allowed to belong, and who is systematically excluded, despite their efforts, their presence, or their need. Who gets to stay, and who is denied that basic right? By reclaiming my story, I hope to open a conversation about visibility, belonging, and the human cost of being pushed out.
Matteo Montaldo
Fictional Landscapes
A vast part of the Netherlands, especially in the western regions – the country’s most densely populated, wealthiest, and economically active areas – has been artificially created. While artificial landscapes are a global phenomenon and a defining feature of the Anthropocene, the Dutch case stands out for both its scale and its historical depth. For centuries, the Netherlands has reclaimed land from water, driven by the ongoing need for safety (a struggle encapsulated by the term waterwolf) as well as by economic growth and social development. Part of Dutch identity can be traced to this relationship with water: to the creation of land from it, and to the continued process of managing and reshaping this constructed terrain.
In my project, I follow a similar logic of construction and transformation – but instead of reclaiming land, I build new photographic landscapes. My aim is to use photography as a tool to synthesise reality into new visual forms, rather than isolating or analysing fragments of it. While this approach does not strictly fall within the boundaries of documentary photography, I want to remain in dialogue with that tradition, staying close to its visual language while also questioning and pushing its limits.
I think of the photographic surface as if I were an urban planner; as an architect; and as a director.
I consider the spatial logic of the frame, the selection and combination of visual elements, and the addition of narrative or theatrical dimensions. This is an open project - I am in the making, creating attempts, trials, and sketches.
Nikos Kapetanios
Overflow Protocol
Overflow Protocol is an immersive installation exploring the Netherlands’ spatial crisis through participatory sculpture and glitched 3D scans. Visitors enter a darkened space where a voice narrates the cognitive stress of imagining futures amid housing shortages and climate collapse. As the voice describes systemic failures, projected 3D models of Dutch landscapes distort.
The climax reveals a worktable with materials sourced from The Hague’s urban environment: construction debris, supermarket soil, and water. Participants can use gloves to collectively model alternatives while the voice guides them toward utopian visions. This tactile engagement contrasts with the digital models’ breakdown, materializing the gap between policy promises and lived reality.
Technically, the work combines photogrammetry scans corrupted via Gaussian splatting, controlled lighting (triggered to unveil the table at key moments), and found objects that critique land commodification. The installation frames spatial planning as a battleground where human agency confronts bureaucratic failure.
By oscillating between digital abstraction and messy materiality, Overflow Protocol makes the prospection gap tangible. The brain’s inability to simulate futures under stress becomes a shared, sculptural experience. The work’s title ironically references both computational crashes and emergency procedures, mirroring how the Netherlands’ famed planning protocols now generate chaos rather than control.
Nadia Sheikh
Shrinking Space
In the Netherlands, where the housing market becomes increas ingly inaccessible, Shrinking Space is a photographic research project that explores how adults from diverse backgrounds navigate the urgency and uncertainty of finding a place to call home. This project is rooted in personal history. My parents who were refugees in the 1980s, found stability through social housing.
Today, I use photography and visual storytelling to reflect on how that same foundation is now threatened. I follow the stories of individuals who are living in temporary social housing, squatted buildings (kraakpanden), or who have recently secured long-term housing. Through portraits, architecture, and fragments of daily life, I document the material and emotional weight of the housing crisis. The project captures the contrast between stability and impermanence, between shared space and individual need. It invites viewers to consider the spaces people inhabit and how they’re shaped by policy, waiting lists, and social structures.
Shrinking Space is both documentary and poetic. It makes visible the quiet resilience of people navigating broken systems, while also asking questions about care, belonging, and dignity. This project hopes to activate reflection and responsibility—to push for a future where affordable housing is protected as a right, not a privilege. Rather than focusing solely on one group, this work centres shared struggles across different walks of life. It asks: in a crowded and unequal world, how do we make space for each other, and for the futures we all deserve?
Odysseas Tsompanoglou
Paradise
One hundred years after Le Corbusier’s “Plan Voisin” proposal, the impact of city planning is still very visible in the cultural and political configuration of society. That can be observed from the creation of completely new capital cities (New Cairo, Nusantara) to the rapid expansion of suburban areas in the USA, from the construction of whole neighbourhoods (Biljmer, The Bronx) to the proposal of “The Line” in Saudi Arabia. Architecture was and is, in a few words, a strong political tool that influences the power relations inside a society.
Influenced by Allan Sekula’s idea that “school is a factory,” I attempted to create a speculative city planning proposal for the future. As the Netherlands needs 4 times its size to complete every future planning project, the construction company “ConstrAxion” created “Paradise”, a post-truth residency proposal. It consists of an architectural maquette building that can host 35,000 people (its size is 6,4 acres), is completely green and energy-autonomous, and can replace the existing cities, saving 99% of the land they occupy.
For this project, I faked the existence of the company that proposed the “Paradise” solution (ConstrAxion), and I documented every step behind the realization of such a great project. Also, I chose Instax as the photographic medium because it gives another layer of truthfulness. One of the intrinsic attributes of Instax, being a physically developed picture, is that it holds a prototype that cannot be manipulated. Thus, in the context of each prototype, lies a “testimony” of realness.
Raisa Durandi
Heerlen Here
Interested in how people relate to a place so strongly defined by a past that is no longer visible, I began working in the city of Heerlen. The closure of the coal mines in 1965 marked a turning point. The city’s transition, captured in the slogan “from black to green”, led to the physical demolition of its mining identity, ushering in a prolonged period of disorientation, mass unemployment, and a drug epidemic. What remains is a layered landscape, where memory and transformation coexist uneasily.
Within this context, I was drawn to OUTPOET, a youth-led cultural space in the city center. For the young people I met there, the city’s multilayered backdrop seems to fuel a deep sense of creativity and collective care. Their commitment to shape something of their own –within, alongside, and at times in resistance to official redevelopment – deeply moved me.
This project is a collaborative exploration of how young people relate to Heerlen today, and how they envision its future. Through a visual, process-oriented approach, we reflected on identity, belonging, and transformation. The work asks how a city marked by absence might become a canvas for imagining alternative futures.
Sara Ito
Territories
What will the Netherlands be like in 2125? The predictions for the next hundred years vary widely, but in any case, it is expected that many residents from the western provinces will move to Arnhem-Nijmegen due to the rising sea level. The new centre of the country is slightly higher and dry, embracing the Rhine and Waal rivers that share one basin with plenty of room to flood. The future Dutch landscape represented in the publication I came across were all neatly zoned and balanced. Efficient cities with green spaces, more habitat for animals, and human life integrated into nature within high-rise buildings and floating houses. What would it be like to live with the water and with more people in smaller space? More thorough infrastructure would be needed in every aspect of human activity. Water management, housing, agriculture, industry, mobility and biodiversity will all have to negotiate for space.
Can the Arnhem-Nijmegen region accommodate all these expectations? Can we imagine how much change we need to accept to get there? We are already facing the housing crisis on the land the country reclaimed from the water. Do we have space to imagine a completely different yet better future?
Territoris is a puzzle computer game that invites you to deconstruct and reassemble the Dutch landscape of present and future. You must fit different functions into a limited territory. Keep it flat. Provide food, shelter, and energy for your people to keep surviving. Don’t forget about the biodiversity for the sustainable development of the country resilient to climate change! Territories is just a game but it’s our choice to participate in the game of the Netherlands.
Alberto Vidal Bernedo
The Hand That Comes Begging Without a Story Doesn’t Receive Anything
It reflects on the political and symbolic economy of storytelling within artistic contexts. Set within a speculative framework, the work unfolds through performative gesture as both revelation and critique. It examines how narratives and identities are often instrumentalized—becoming currency, justification, or plea. Drawing on traditions of material testimony and meta-performance, the piece questions who is entitled to speak, which stories are heard, and what must be dismantled for a story to gain value.
