Mirror Becomes a Partner: photography as (im)material encounters
FOTODOK

FOTODOK’s Lighthouse is coming to Rib. From 18 until 27 September, the Lighthouse Talents of 2024/2025 will present their work in the exhibition titled Mirror Becomes a Partner: photography as (im)material encounters.

Within this exhibition the artists Alia Leonardi, Davide Sartori, Dragan Saric, Eliza-Sophie Sekrève, Flo Verhulst, Luuk van Raamsdonk, Te Petchara, Romina Koopman, Romy Zhang and Tashiya de Mel enter into dialogue on how images capture and shape memory, bodies, and relations. The exhibition gathers working propositions—objects, films, and transmissions—to manifest what imaginaries might emerge between them. The medium of photography is stretched through the engagement with its (im)materiality and images become stages for (intimate) encounters.

The exhibition marks the end of a year of participation in the Lighthouse talent program, in which the artists were supported in broadening their engagement with the world beyond the academy, and deepening their relations to each other. Under the curatorial guidance of Rib’s own Maziar Afrassiabi, the final outcome of this year's Lighthouse cohort takes the shape of an exhibition titled Mirror Becomes a Partner.

A reflective surface becomes a companion, suggesting transition as self-recognition and inviting the viewer into the delicate work of becoming visible to oneself and others. The history of psychiatry’s taxonomies overlaps with the history of stigma—psychiatry once classified patients as bird species. Yet birds appear here as companions that resist the urge to classify. Restaged moments coalesce with family archives, weighing what is present against what is absent. Images both witness and direct what we project. Cloud-residues return as topographies, slowing the scroll into an attentive look. A pile attempts to translate phone-dependence into matter, shifting endless data into fragile weight. Quantity becomes a feeling: memory as stack and potential melt. Ghosts enter the gallery as flickers on a CRT. The “signal” stains the space, suggesting that hauntings are also infrastructures we live inside—and that live inside us. A collection made from rainwater and tears. An ice sphere, slowly melting, braids homesickness with folklore—mermaids, rituals to stop rain, the social weight placed on women’s bodies. Water carries memory; melting becomes a soft refusal. The afterlife of art school. Portraits build a commons of experience where uncertainty becomes a resource.