— Eulogy
2024 - ongoing
I Mistook The Laughter For Love, 2024 - UV Print on Plywood, Acrylic Frame, 40 x 100 x 3,6 cm (three panels)
Eulogy began with a single photograph. In 2020, at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, my grandfather died suddenly at home in Indonesia. A local newspaper published a photograph of him being carried from the house in a body bag. Seeing this image was disorienting. An intimate family moment had been turned into a public document. At the same time, it made me aware of how photography has always shaped the way I understand family history, migration, and loss. My grandfather was born to an Indonesian mother and a Dutch soldier, caught between cultures shaped by colonialism, war, and displacement. Although he spent much of his life searching for clues about his origins, he rarely spoke about what he found. That silence carried weight.
Obituary no. 3, 2024 - UV Print on Ceramic, 7,5 x 15 x 1 cm
Obituary no. 6, 2024 - UV Print on Ceramic, 7,5 x 15 x 1 cm
That photograph became the starting point for an ongoing body of work that reflects on grief, inherited silence, and the unstable nature of memory. Rather than reconstructing a linear family history, Eulogy unfolds through fragments. I began digging into my family archive, gathering photographs, letters, and personal objects and combining them with my own images. I also work with AI-generated reconstructions that attempt to visualize memories that no longer exist, or were never photographed. The images are not treated as fixed records but as malleable material: cut, layered, enlarged, or partially obscured, allowing gaps and distortions to remain visible.
Eulogy on display at Fotomuseum Den Haag, 2025
Material plays a central role. Photographs are translated into UV-printed plywood panels, ceramic surfaces, a woven tapestry, a room divider, and video. By moving the image onto wood, clay, and textile, the work gains weight and texture. The photographs behave less like flat prints and more like objects that can age, crack, or be handled. Memory becomes physical and embodied rather than distant or nostalgic.
It’s Really Happening, 2025 - UV Print on Plywood, 40 x 60 x 1,8 cm (two panels)
The use of textile and the room divider stems from my research in Indonesia, where decorative domestic objects and architectural elements have long functioned as carriers of stories and family histories. These forms introduce a spatial way of narrating, allowing images to divide, guide, or structure the room instead of simply hanging on the wall.
AI is part of the process as another tool, similar to a scanner or darkroom. I use it to test, reconstruct, or hallucinate scenes from the past. The resulting images often feel slightly uncanny or unstable, mirroring the way recollection shifts over time. They do not replace photographs, but question what an image can hold or repair.
The Gathering, 2025 - UV Print on Ceramic, 7,5 x 15 x 1 cm
Yellow, 2024 - UV Print on PlywoodThe Palette (Bar Dancing), 2024 - UV Print on Plywood, Oil Paint, 30 x 20 x 1,8 cm
A video work extends these ideas further. Using an algorithm originally designed for web design, I feed in cut-up fragments of family photographs to generate a rippling, continuously morphing image that never settles. The movement reflects the way memories fade, distort, and take on new shapes depending on who is remembering them, holding a familiar tension between remembering and forgetting.
I Felt Very, Very Cold, 2024 - UV Print on Plywood, Acrylic Frame, 40 x 90 x 3,6 cm (two panels)
In the exhibition space, Eulogy functions as an installation rather than a series of discrete works. Panels combine into larger compositions, tiles repeat like markers, textiles absorb and soften the image, and structures shape the viewer’s movement through the space. Together they form a landscape of remembrance where personal grief intersects with broader histories of migration, colonial legacy, and family inheritance. Eulogy treats photography not as evidence, but as a fragile container for memory, something that can both preserve and distort the past.
Cadzand. 1983, 2024 - Excerpt of Video Work Cadzand. 1983, 2024 - Installation View