Guest Room:
Annet Dekker & Margriet Schavemaker

Guest Room is a format that fosters collaboration and sparks creative exchange. For this edition, curator and researcher Annet Dekker invited Margriet Schavemaker to collaboratively explore "The Brilliance of the Mundane".

"Millions of images circulate daily, some are profiled on social media sites, uploaded on personal pages, or printed in photobooks. Yet most are discarded in the dark corners of hard drives, platforms, and search engines. They form collections of glitched machine workings, slop AI, landscapes on repeat, selfies from all angles, or accidentally touched camera buttons that create blurred pathways. Never to be seen by humans, these images are a dispersed archive of the banal, the repetitive, or the utterly mundane. They were not meant to be seen by other humans, nor do they count as poor images; they are merely a mistake, dull and unexciting.

This Guest Room reflects on the unnoticed and the unremarkable: images rooted in everyday life, shaped by happenstance, and hasty habits. We want to explore how these fragments operate as a form of digital folklore fueling the aesthetics and energies of contemporary image practices. Rather than dismissing this proliferation as mere banality, we ask: how to restore dignity to these images? How to speak about what appears grey, unfocused, glitched, out of framing, or merely repetitive, and in doing so, sharpen our perception of the brilliance of the mundane?"