UNFAIR 2026: Thomas Kuijpers presents 'Stranding'

STRANDING

On many fronts, we seem to be grinding to a halt. While we are promised unlimited progress through technological developments around AI, physical life is increasingly pushed to the background. Our relationship with the planet is escalating; so are our relationships with each other as a species, and with the species around us. Everything must be faster, bigger, better, but all these improvements are aimed mostly at a virtual reality, while physical reality crumbles away in its favor.

We stand at a junction where mankind, self-centered and enchanted by the virtual, no longer gives the material world the attention it deserves — a consequence of algorithms engineered to fragment our attention. That world was never built for this fragmented state; the screen was. What is new is the scale of that neglect: a physical world that is barely being looked at, no longer touched, even as it burns, floods, and dries out around us. Stuck in a scroll, away from physical contact, we scroll past messages of billionaires searching for a new planet, because the proximity of this one has become too confronting.

It is the traces of that grinding movement that Thomas Kuijpers tracks in Stranding. In the present, he searches for scenes in which the technological modern human no longer seems to exist; abandoned cars, empty houses, once again consumed by the never-ending force of nature. But he also searches for the reverse: scenes in which nature has to make room for the technological needs of the modern human, and the effects this has on accessibility in public spaces, the landscape, and its inhabitants. Between these two poles, the ongoing battle between the physical and the virtual is currently playing out. These documentary scenes sometimes contain staged elements, but are consistently devoid of humans. Shooting on a large-format camera, Kuijpers works against the logic of the scroll itself: a way of insisting on the attention for the physical we've withdrawn, and on its inevitable return, whatever may become of us as a species.

Stranding comes in an edition of 2 plus 1 AP. The prints are mounted analog C-prints on Fuji CLP2, encased in a perspex box frame.

For more information, please contact the gallery at info@theravestijngallery.com