2026-09-16 | Nella Ngingo: in a group exhibition at FOTODOK
Our fellow Nella Ngingo is participating in a group exhibition, on tokens and open secrets, at FOTODOK, curated by Aïda Sidhoum and Yusser al Obaidi, as the culmination of the 2025-2026 Lighthouse programme.
How do you share your [stories] without laying your [people] completely bare? There are things we can offer one another beyond understanding. Telling intimate stories in full can strip them of their magic, leaving them open to being dissected from a distance. Sometimes, what is withheld is not absent, but held in another form.
One can think of cultural memories through the idea of open secrets: truths that are not exactly hidden, but are understood to remain partly unspoken. They are passed on with the understanding that they are not supposed to be fully shared, that in some ways they still need to remain unknown in order to be kept safe. Some stories carried within a family are never actively told, yet become visible through a habit, a found document, a domestic object, or a shared ritual or belief. If you know, you know. And if you don’t, what’s in it for you to know?
Over the course of the 2025-2026 Lighthouse programme, the ten selected photographers and artists navigated how to offer ways into their work and ways towards each other without compromising the values and intimacies within their practices. Together, we explored what it means to honour personal, family and/or cultural histories carried through loss, while navigating a world ruled by extractivist logic. How do we hold our longing for belonging when the rituals and technologies that connect us are made to control, extract from and harm us? How to still engage with the sacred and ever so intimate details of it all, without falling into traps of embracing that which harms you?
Akin to tokens, each work on view is a carrier: a container of symbols, traces of what remains and gestures that may or may not be exchanged. The works are not meant to be fixed in their meaning or form, but to set something in motion—to carry forward a process of remembering, the work of grief and coping, the search for togetherness and the ongoing labour of protecting it all.
Participating artists: Changli Luo, Tyler Chan, Sarah Rose Antoun, das james, Joris Maatman, Nella Ngingo, Tim Ross, Justin Ugochukwu, Wang Xue Sophia, Xaveer May
Curated by Aïda Sidhoum and Yusser al Obaidi
Graphic design: Yusser al Obaidi
Opening: 25 September, 18:00–22:00
You can see the exhibition until 10 October.