A number of highlights at Unseen Photo during Art Rotterdam 2026
From 27 to 29 March 2026, Unseen Photo will present a sharply curated international photography programme within Art Rotterdam at Rotterdam Ahoy, bringing together established names and emerging talent. This year, Unseen consists of six interconnected components. On the fair floor, Unseen appears in the Main Sectionand the Solo/Duo programme, both tightly selected and fully embedded among the wider Art Rotterdam presentations across 14,000 m².
The curated sections bring Unseen’s conceptual depth into focus. Presenting photography within a curated framework lends the works a museum-level focus while revealing how dynamic, varied and resonant the medium is today. The New Photography section, curated by the Unseen fair committee (Caroline O’Breen, Domenico de Chirico, Els Drummen, Hedy van Erp and Dries Roelens), forms a distinctive photographic pavilion on the fair floor, together with Encounters and The Past Present.
In Encounters, the Milan-based curator Domenico de Chirico examines the interplay between photography and other artistic practices, generating new narratives and hybrid visual worlds that stretch the medium’s boundaries.
In The Past Present, photo historian, curator and author Hedy van Erp offers a contemporary perspective on analogue photography up to the year 2000, with particular attention to lost archives and found images. She brings together artists who use existing photographic material and techniques in new ways, to restore weight and meaning to the past.
Together, these curated sections offer a layered overview of photographic positions, ranging from conceptual research projects to spatial installations and post-digital image culture. The featured artists respond to themes such as identity, technology and materiality as well as to the shifting circulation and interpretation of images. As a result, Unseen Photo develops a distinct signature within Art Rotterdam and deepens the fair’s artistic scope, creating a platform that connects photography with other contemporary disciplines in a dynamic environment that appeals to a young and international public.
The sixth pillar, the Unseen Book Market, takes place simultaneously at the new location of the Nederlands Fotomuseum in Pakhuis Santos, which opens in February. In the museum, an official partner, forty publishers present a wide range of photobooks and publications.
Unseen Photo is powered by the new Partner Van Lanschot Kempen.
A number of highlights
Several presentations stand out within the selection.
Intervalle (Paris) highlights Julien Mignot’s series “Screenlove” in the New Photography section. In these works, the artist examines how intimacy and distance shift in an era in which relationships unfold through screens. Mignot works with blurred webcam images, created with the explicit consent of his models, which he casts in semi-transparent blocks, so that the image appears or disappears depending on the viewing angle. The series, rooted in his youthful curiosity about the lives unfolding behind windows, reflects on digital voyeurism, the fragility of relationships, contemporary forms of loneliness and the power embedded in the act of looking. For Unseen Photo 2026 Intervalle presents new, previously unseen works from the series. Mignot has previously created commissioned work for The New York Times, Vanity Fair, The New Yorker, Chanel, Hermès, Louis Vuitton and the Opéra de Paris.
In the Encounters section, VIASATERNA (Milan) will show work by Teresa Giannico, who transforms digital image fragments from the online realm into layered compositions at the intersection of photography, collage and painting. Her dreamlike scenes reveal how algorithms shape our ways of seeing and how the mind reconstructs fragmented imagery into new realities. In her recent work, she examines the objectivity of photography with both precision and poetic restraint, in an age of endless digital reproducibility. Until 18 January 2026, her work is on view at the eighteenth Quadriennale d’Arte in Rome.
Hedy van Erp: "Ray K. Metzker (1931–2014, United States) is regarded as part of the photographic avant-garde and a pioneer of urban photography, in which he experimented extensively with light. In 2026, a monograph of his work, City Lux, will be published. His work is held in the collections of institutions including MoMA, the Metropolitan Museum, the Whitney Museum, the J Paul Getty Museum and the Albertina. The Paris gallery Les Douches La Galerie is presenting rare vintage Ray Metzker prints, which are seldom offered."
Erika Deák Gallery (Budapest) will present work by Andrea Gáldi Vinkó in the Encounters section. In her practice, the artist examines the tension between intimacy, identity and the vulnerability of everyday life, weaving personal experience together with universal themes. Her photographs, often balancing between the everyday and the absurdly poetic, have been shown at the Robert Capa Contemporary Photography Center and Kunsthalle Budapest. She has created commissioned work for Tate, Vogue Italia, The New Yorker, Die Zeit, i-D, Dazed and Le Monde. With her distinctive visual narratives, she is regarded as one of the most compelling voices in Hungarian photography.
193 Gallery (Paris | Saint-Tropez | Venice) shows a solo installation by Thandiwe Muriu in the Solo/Duo section. Her “Camo” series explores identity, cultural heritage and female self-awareness through Vlisco wax fabrics, emphasising how the past continues to shape the future. For the fair, the gallery incorporates original Vlisco textiles, allowing Muriu’s work to resonate with the cultural and historical context of these fabrics and their longstanding ties to Rotterdam and its international trade networks. Her work appeared at the most recent Venice Biennale in the exhibition ‘Passengers in Transit’ by 193 Gallery, an official Collateral Event, and was recently included in a group exhibition curated by Pharrell Williams at Perrotin in Paris. This year she was selected for the KYOTOGRAPHIE International Photography Festival African Artist Residency Program.
In “ReCollection”, Casper Faassen (Bildhalle, Amsterdam, in the Solo/Duo section) explores how photography can move beyond documentation into an almost sculptural form by creating 1:1 reinterpretations of contested colonial artefacts from museum collections such as those of the Louvre and the British Museum. In a contemporary Wunderkammer, he gathers these photographic objects as a critical reflection on collecting, ownership and the stories inherited from previous generations. Through layered techniques, visible traces of time and the question of who holds the right to preserve history, Faassen turns photography into a poetic and political medium.
Einspach & Czapolai Fine Art (Budapest) will show work by Tamas Dezsö in the Main Section. His ongoing series ‘Notes for an Epilogue’ reveals the quiet legacy of a post-communist Romania. Dezsö’s work captures with remarkable sensitivity how history becomes embedded in the everyday and shapes the ways societies move forward in the layered aftermath of a regime. His photographs have been shown at Foam Photography Museum Amsterdam, the Robert Capa Contemporary Photography Center and the Shanghai Museum of Contemporary Art, and have appeared in publications such as The New York Times and Le Monde.
About the curators
Domenico de Chirico is an independent curator based in Milan. He taught Visual Culture and Trend Research at Istituto Europeo di Design Milan (2011–2015) and served as Artistic Director of DAMA Fair, Turin (2016–2019). His experience includes jury roles, artist residencies, and teaching positions at institutions such as Goldsmiths (London), Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design (Prague), Nuova Accademia di Belle Arti (Milan), and the Accademia di Belle Arti di Bologna. He has been a visiting curator at the Swiss Institute in Rome and the Artistic Director of Ortigia Contemporanea 2024. Current projects include curatorial roles at SWAB Barcelona, MIA Photo Fair (Milan), and Prisma Art Prize (Rome).
Hedy van Erp is a Dutch photo historian, curator, and author specialising in vintage and vernacular photography. She has worked on exhibitions for institutions such as the Nederlands Fotomuseum, Fotomuseum The Hague, the National Media Museum (UK), the Science Museum (London) and (now) H’ART Museum in Amsterdam. She is also the co-author of Photography Decoded (Tate Publishing, 2019). Current projects include an exhibition co-curated with Susan Bright, scheduled for June 2026 at the Alice Austen House Museum in New York, and an upcoming issue of the international photozine Fotozini, dedicated to vintage, obscure and unconventional photography.
