We’re looking forward to welcoming Justus de Rode to Ex Nihilo. He’s coming all the way from Amsterdam to show 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘦𝘢𝘳𝘵𝘩 𝘪𝘴 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘦𝘢𝘳 𝘰𝘧 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘣𝘦𝘢𝘳, opening Saturday 31 October.

Through photography, sculpture and video, the exhibition proposes the cave as a living archive where different temporalities, mourning rituals and forms of belief converge. Responding to ambiguous loss, it reflects on the diminished place of ritual and alternative forms of knowledge in modernity.

Justus de Rode (b. 1997, Groningen) grew up in a painter’s household, and his practice moves across media. Scholarly inquiry and the numinous inform his work in equal measure, and a tension between reason and instinct runs through all of it. Recurring motifs like the cave and the bear reach back toward prehistoric spirituality, mysticism and not-knowing, in response to a disenchanted present.