De Metende Mens / Counting on Nature

Hans van der Meer (1955) is known for taking polarised subjects and making them approachable again. A master of careful and perceptive photographic observation, he takes a step back and really looks. In De Metende Mens / Counting on Nature the current state of our living environment is the primary subject, but the behaviour of humanity (en masse as well as individually) is of equal importance. In a literal sense, van der Meer’s images investigate people, who are in turn investigating nature.

As with Time to Change, his 2018 project about dairy farming, Van der Meer raises questions by using both photography and text: What are we looking at here? What do these, often strange and somewhat comical situations represent? What are those serious looking people doing in that landscape with their hi-tech equipment? What about those people in a different landscape with a notepad in one hand and a pencil in the other? Are they counting or drawing or what? It seems significant that many of them are down on their knees, in intense concentration, bending over the earth.

Counting on Nature features a broad range of scientific projects that are measuring and monitoring nature. From the levels of nitrogen deposits in soil, to the declining populations of northern voles, pine martens, eels and garlic toads to name just a few. But in essence this is about mankind. Will the collection of data and the accumulation of scientific evidence ultimately lead us towards an era in which humans no longer position themselves above nature, but alongside it?

In March,GIGA by Jakob Ganslmeier and Ana Zibelnik opened at Foam Amsterdam. The travelling exhibition critically examines how right-wing radical ideologies weaponise TikTok and meme culture to craft unsettling digital realities. Ganslmeier and Zibelnik adeptly delineate a pattern illustrating how mainstream visual language is co-opted by extremist factions to amplify their influence. The exhibition’s title GIGA is borrowed from its prevalent usage across social media platforms, embodying greatness and commanding respect. The current version of the project that premiered at Foam, is a video installation with three works, Bereitschaft (2024), Redpilled (2023) and Public Enlightenment‍ – Strong is Beautiful (2022). A fourth videowork will be added to GIGA in the course of the year. Bereitschaft will will be on show in 2025 at Zitadelle Spandau Berlin, the Finnish Museum of Photography in Helsinki and the Museum of Contemporary Art Ljubljana.

Under the title NOWHERE/NOW HERE: AI as Curator? Paradox director Bas Vroege and photographer Frank van der Salm talked about the experimental use of artificial intelligence in a curatorial role at the Jimei x Arles Photography Festival and also at ICI/Xiamen University late November. The talk, subtitled ‘Stretching the negotiated space between artist and curator’ referred to their recent collaboration for Van der Salm’s retrospective for the Nederlands Fotomuseum in Rotterdam (NL). NOWHERE was developed with a team including an AI scientist, a data designer, a composer and an architect. The lectures in Xiamen, supported by the Mondriaan Fund and the Dutch Embassy, laid the groundwork for exhibitions planned at the Three Shadows Photography Art Centre in Beijing and Xiamen for 2025.

Now You See Me Moria launched in 2021, was the subject of a Finnish academic study by Berfin Nur Osso and Henk van Houtum. The article Now You See Me: Refugees Looking Back at the EU’s Border Camp Watch in Lesvos was published by Taylor & Francis Online.
Now You See Me Moria also features in the recently published book FLASHPOINT – Protest Photography in Print (1850–Present) by 10×10 Photobooks in New York. NYSMM was acquired by the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam in 2024 and is currently part of their exhibition Tomorrow is a Different Day (1980–Now). It will remain on display until mid-2025.

Houses of Darkness was the title of the project Paradox developed together with the WW2 memorial centres in Bergen-Belsen (DE), Westerbork (NL) and Falstad (NO) in 2022-2023. It was conceived as an online environment for a young audience initially, but also grew out into the physical exhibitions If a Tree Fell in a Forest in Bergen-Belsen and Perpetrator Perspectives in Falstad. Ingvild Hagen Kjørholt, Professor of Literature Didactics at NTNU in Trondheim, analysed the latter’s contribution to the complex representation of perpetrator’s in her article The Nazi Camp Commandant’s House as a Space of Complicity: Understanding Art at Atrocity Sites – the Case of Falstad, Norway published by Winchester University Press.