SARAH VAN RIJ
HUMMING FROM THE SHADOWS

With a sensitivity to detail, Dutch photographer Sarah van Rij (*1990) creates fragmentary, timeless, and mysterious compositions that reveal the poetic potential of everyday life. Her shadow theater unfolds through a play of light and dark, form and color, in which silhouettes and recurring objects set the rhythm of a visual score.

HUMMING FROM THE SHADOWS at the Hall for Contemporary Art is van Rij’s first solo exhibition in Germany and features more than twenty works, some of them large formats, from the last seven years.

Van Rij playfully transcends the documentary role of photography, transforming reality into dreamlike, surrealistic images: disembodied hands, martini glasses, and abandoned pumps drift through her pictures like fleeting echoes. Fragmented figures intertwine with floral compositions for evocative and symbolic images to emerge. Deeply embedded in our collective memory, they cast long shadows into the exhibition space.

Whether captured with her iPhone or on camera, in her work everyday life becomes a film set of overlooked traces and hints. When reflections in windows or on water surfaces shimmer with cinematic melancholy, suggestive, fragmentary narratives emerge. Van Rij herself also becomes part of her compositions: she appears in shadows and obscured reflections, repeatedly breaking down the distance between viewer and photographic image. Viewing and reassembling characterize van Rij’s work as an open process, a form of collage in which she continually fragments and reconstructs her world anew—whether in urban landscapes, still lifes, or self-portraits.

Self-taught photographer Sarah van Rij (born 1990) lives and works in Amsterdam and Paris. Her work has been published in renowned magazines such as The New Yorker, i-D Magazine, The New York Times, Vogue, and ZEITmagazin. Her work is presented in several solo exhibitions this year, including at the Maison Européenne de la Photographie (MEP) in Paris and the Chiba Prefectural Museum of Art in Japan.

The exhibition was curated by Nadine Isabelle Henrich, Curator at the House of Photography, together with Viktoria Weber, Curatorial Fellow at the House of Photography, in close collaboration with Sarah van Rij.

The photographs were produced by WhiteWall as high-quality fine art prints to mark the fifth anniversary of the partnership with the Deichtorhallen, enabling the artistic work to be realized with precise material aesthetics in the exhibition space.