Exhibition / Eulogy by Sander Coers

About the event

In 2020, during the first waves of the pandemic, Sander Coers comes across a photograph published in the Bali Post depicting the recovery of his grandfather’s body – the son of an Indonesian woman and a Dutch soldier – whose life had been marked by silence surrounding his origins and the shadows of colonialism. The artist perceives the news image as an intrusion into private life and decides to create Eulogy, a multidisciplinary project that investigates memory, migration, and personal inheritance.

Sander begins to delve into his family archive, collecting old photographs, letters, and objects, which he places in dialogue with his own visual research. Some images are processed using Artificial Intelligence, whose algorithms incorporate information and stereotypes rooted in the visual culture of the past two centuries. Together, they form a visual narrative that reflects on how stories and memories are passed down, often reconstructed and, at times, erased.

“AI fascinates me because it mimics the way memory works. It exaggerates certain features, blurs others – like looking at a dream of a memory rather than the memory itself. For me, the technology represents a form of collective memory, shaped by wider datasets and cultural bias. Even when it generates something ‘new,’ it’s still shaped by existing perceptions of history and identity.”

The materiality through which we preserve these fragments of time becomes a central aspect of the project. “During a trip to Indonesia, I became fascinated by the way objects hold stories. They carry history in a way that feels tactile and physical.” Drawing from this observation, the artist creates ceramic tiles onto which a mix of archival photographs and images altered or directly generated by artificial intelligence are UV-printed, then hand-glazed using a color palette inspired by the hues of the Bali Post photograph.

Color thus becomes a critical object, going beyond its simple function of setting the emotional tone of a past event and emerging as a central theme of analysis. Its cultural and symbolic meanings, codified over time, profoundly shape the way reality is perceived. Its interaction with the new visual imagery constructed by the artist helps us break down complex emotions. A colored detail can become the anchor point of memory, even when the surrounding context dissolves.

This ongoing dialogue between present and past, collective and individual, analog and digital, allows us to decode the mechanisms that shape our perception of the past. Memory is thus revealed as a complex mosaic of interactions and layers which, once isolated, analyzed, and reassembled, offer us a deeper understanding of our intergenerational heritage, whether on an intimate or collective level.

Bio

Sander Coers (b. 1997) is a visual artist based in Rotterdam. By deconstructing and recontextualising memories through archival photos, analogue techniques, and AI-generated images, he explores how stories are passed down across generations. He often works with physical materials like wood, textiles, and ceramics, touching on themes like masculinity and nostalgia.

Since graduating in 2021 from Willem de Kooning Academie in Rotterdam, Sander has published three books: Come Home, This Naked Incident, and Blue Mood (Al Mar). His work has been shown in museums and galleries in places like Los Angeles, Tokyo, London, Milan, Amsterdam, and Berlin, and featured in The Guardian, Vogue, Die Zeit, and i-D. He was named a “Rising Star of 2022” by Dutch newspaper NRC and selected for Foam Talent in 2024. His work is held in public and private collections across the Netherlands and internationally.

Admission to the exhibition is free. For more information, write to us at info@phmuseumlab.com.