NL Imagined is a survey of contemporary Dutch photography curated by Yining He and Ruben Lundgren. The exhibition includes the work of 11 established and emerging artists, which all currently live and work in the Netherlands. The exhibition showcase the artists' responses to contemporary topics concerning the history, society and culture of the Netherlands. In the collected works of these photographers, we find challenges to established paradigms of both the language and techniques inherent in the Dutch photographic tradition. The approaches taken reflect the artists' efforts to reshape contemporary Dutch photographic arts with greater relevance to the rapidly evolving present times.
The exhibition features works from Marwan Bassiouni, Johannes Bosgra, Hans Eijkelboom, Marvel Harris, Erik Kessels, Dana Lixenberg, Corinne Noordenbos, Erwin Olaf, Paulien Oltheten, Viviane Sassen and Gilleam Trapenberg. Through a wide array of creative approaches, the participating artists capture the architecture of sacred spaces, look at nature, community and everyday life, together with topics of colonization, personal identity, and kinship, as topics for reflection. These combine to a newly current dialogue between history and the present, between today’s reality and what Chinese audiences might imagine about the Netherlands.
Promoting deeper communication between China and the Netherlands is one of the main motivations for this exhibition project. This year marks the 50th anniversary of diplomatic relations between China and the Netherlands. NL Imagined is an essential cultural component of a broader program that has been conceived in celebration of this anniversary. The exhibition includes examples of award-winning photobooks published by leading Dutch publishers and other institutions on loan from the cultural section of the Embassy of the Kingdom of the Netherlands in China. The exhibition will also be accompanied by a range of online and offline sharing and discussion on practices in Dutch photography.
Shanghai Center of Photography (6 August 2022- 9 October 2022)
Three Shadows Photography Centre, Beijing (16 December 2022 - 9 April 2023)
Fosun Foundation, Chengdu (21 April 2023 - 11 Juni 2023)
Three Shadows Photography Centre, Xiamen (22 Augustus 2023 - 12 November 2023)
Goethe Institute, Hongkong (20 Januari 2024 - 16 March 2024)
