Thomas Kuijpers

Thomas Kuijpers sees the world as something fluid, manipulated, constructed. Rather than adhering to the idea that it can be experienced objectively, his work reveals the world’s slippery nature and the forces that perpetually shape it — newspapers, television, the internet, politics, adverts, social media, technology, products and more. For Kuijpers, the world is always perceived through or influenced by something. Truth is dependent on who, what, where, when and how, and we are never impartial.

Kuijpers’ investigative works start with his daily experience of current events, happenings that rapidly become a kaleidoscope of diverse, overlapping, conflicting perspectives — including his own. Each event is copied and pasted indefinitely through an endless media landscape, and it is these copies — images, articles, conversations, videos, memorabilia, quotes — that Kuijpers habitually collects over years, forming archives of competing realities.

Acting as artist, editor, anthropologist and collector simultaneously, he scrutinises and rearranges his archives until the structures of our media-saturated world are uncovered. Kuijpers then assembles his findings into new constellations, often taking the form of experimental, multimedia installations, inviting us to be aware of the illusions and rhetoric that mould our everyday lives. Ironically, it is only through Kuijpers’ obsession with the minute parts of the world that we see just how fragile it is as a whole.

Thomas Kuijpers completed his MFA Photography in 2011 at AKV St. Joost (Breda, the Netherlands) and has been exhibited at institutions, fairs and galleries internationally including: Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Foam, Amsterdam; Krakow Photo Month, Krakow; Fotopub Festival, Novo Mesto; Beaconsfield Gallery Vauxhall, London; Frankfurter Kunstverein, Frankfurt; Red Hook Labs, New York City and MASP, São Paulo amongst others. In 2017, he was nominated as a Foam Talent and his latest book, Hoarder Order (Fw: Books, 2020) was shortlisted for the Paris Photo-Aperture Foundation Photobook Awards 2020.