Title: Unearthing: otherwise
Date: 28.04.2026
Time: 18.30–20.30
Location Stroom Den Haag, Hogewal 1-9, Den Haag
Food will be provided during the event
Please register via Eventbrite (limited spots)
Join us for Unearthing: otherwise, the closing public program of our current exhibition Positions: Unearthing. During this evening, artists Ben Yau and Priyageetha Dia will give an artist talk, diving into their artistic practices and methodologies. Exploring the notion of toxicity, both artists will challenge dominant understandings of engineered environments shaped by colonial powers–be it from the soil and the land to the archives.
The second part of the evening will be hosted by artist, filmmaker, writer, and educator Aram Lee and centers the question: How might a plot, as land and narrative, unsettle plots shaped by military occupation, empire, plantation logics, and development? The workshop Can a plot demilitarize a plot? invites us to engage with militarized landscapes and the more-than-human beings the land holds, including those long othered, trampled, or displaced. It opens questions around how sites have been plotted through dominant regimes that continue to structure the present.
Working with the autobiography of the land as a method, the workshop explores how land may narrate itself as a polyphonic subject across multiple temporalities and scales, in resonance with approaches from time-based media. Participants collectively experiment with re-plotting through micro–macro mapping and speculative writing. Here, plot becomes a site where fragmented and externalised beings may recompose into constellations, and where plot emerges as land and storyline, continuously transforming.
Unearthing, uprooting is organized as part of the public program of Positions: Unearthing, on view until May 3rd in Stroom Den Haag. For any other inquiries, you can reach out to Leana Boven at lboven@stroom.nl.
Aram Lee (b. Seoul) is an artist, filmmaker, writer, and educator based in Amsterdam. Grounded in feminist materialism, her practice examines how hegemonic institutions structure time, bodies, and perception through non-human agents. Working with institutional residues such as European ethnographic museum practices, preservation technologies, territorial sites, and ecological matter, her work reveals marginalized narratives and subverts dominant cultural structures. Her work has been exhibited internationally, including at the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, Wereldmuseum Amsterdam, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, and the Biennale de Dakar. She is a co-founder of When Site Lost the Plot.
Ben Yau (b.1992, Glasgow) is a Chinese-Scots visual artist based in The Hague, NL. He graduated from MA Photography & Society at the Royal Academy of Art, The Hague, in 2023 and from Camberwell College of Arts in Fine Art Photography in 2019. That same year, he was selected for Bloomberg New Contemporaries as well as Creekside Open. Selected exhibitions include solo presentations In the Shadow of Ashes, The Balcony (The Hague 2024), Proximate Currents: When Everything Fuses Together, Iniva (online/London 2020); and group exhibitions The London Open, Whitechapel Gallery (London 2022), Bloomberg New Contemporaries, Leeds Art Gallery, and South London Gallery, (2019).
His work emerges from historiographical research of othered narratives: the repression of certain histories, and the imperial operations that are conducted to this end. These narratives are often left out of official accounts of history, and therefore demand a multi-modal approach beyond the scope of conventional institutions of history. This approach involves intervening in, mediating, and countering the archive, utilising the generative ambiguities of artistic research. From research-led processes, he engages with diverse materials including declassified intelligence documents, archival films, and newspaper clippings.
Priyageetha Dia works with time-based media and installation. Her practice braids themes of Southeast Asian labour histories, speculation in the tropics, and ancestral memory meeting machine logics. Through archival and field research, she explores nonlinearity and practices of refusal against dominant narratives.
Recent exhibitions include 4th Bangkok Art Biennale (2024); Manifesta 15, Barcelona (2024); 60th La Biennale di Venezia, Venice (2024); Arts House, Melbourne (2024); Diriyah Biennale, Saudi Arabia (2024); Frieze Seoul (2023); Singapore Art Museum (2023); Kochi-Muziris Biennale, Kerala, India (2022); La Trobe Art Institute, Australia (2022); National Gallery Singapore (2020); and Art Science Museum, Singapore (2019). She was artist-in-residence at the NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore in 2022 and the SEA AiR-Studio Residencies at the Jan van Eyck Academie in the Netherlands in 2023.