The artists and photographers of FOTODOK’S talent programme Lighthouse, edition 2025-2026, present their work in On Tokens and Open Secrets. This group exhibition is the outcome of what Changli Luo, Tyler Chan, Sarah Rose Antoun, das james, Joris Maatman, Nella Ngingo, Tim Ross, Justin Ugochukwu, Wang Xue Sophia, Xaveer May have worked on in the past year as part of Lighthouse.
How do you share your [stories] without laying your [people] completely bare? There are things we can offer one another beyond understanding. Telling intimate stories in full can strip them of their magic, leaving them open to being dissected from a distance. Sometimes, what is withheld is not absent, but held in another form.
One can think of cultural memories through the idea of open secrets: truths that are not exactly hidden, but are understood to remain partly unspoken. They are passed on with the understanding that they are not supposed to be fully shared, that in some ways they still need to remain unknown in order to be kept safe. Some stories carried within a family are never actively told, yet become visible through a habit, a found document, a domestic object, or a shared ritual or belief. If you know, you know. And if you don’t, what’s in it for you to know?
Over the course of the 2025-2026 Lighthouse programme, the ten selected photographers and artists navigated how to offer ways into their work and ways towards each other without compromising the values and intimacies within their practices. Together, we explored what it means to honour personal, family and/or cultural histories carried through loss, while navigating a world ruled by extractivist logic. How do we hold our longing for belonging when the rituals and technologies that connect us are made to control, extract from and harm us? How to still engage with the sacred and ever so intimate details of it all, without falling into traps of embracing that which harms you?
Akin to tokens, each work on view is a carrier: a container of symbols, traces of what remains and gestures that may or may not be exchanged. The works are not meant to be fixed in their meaning or form, but to set something in motion—to carry forward a process of remembering, the work of grief and coping, the search for togetherness and the ongoing labour of protecting it all.
Practical information:
On show from 25 September until 25 October
Opening hours: Sat-Sun 11:30-18:00
Location: FOTODOK, Lange Nieuwstraat 7, 3512 PA Utrecht
Opening:
Friday 25th of September 18:00-22:00
Programme:
18:00 Doors open
19:00 Word of welcome by curators and artists
19:30 Quote archive reading by das james
20:00 Snacks + drinks
Artists talks:
Sunday October 11 and Sunday October 25
participating artists Changli Luo, Tyler Chan, Sarah Rose Antoun, das james, Joris Maatman, Nella Ngingo, Tim Ross, Justin Ugochukwu, Wang Xue Sophia, Xaveer May
curated by Aïda Sidhoum and Yusser al Obaidi
graphic design: Yusser al Obaidi
