There can’t be many European fine art photographers who have not at some point applied to the regular Noorderlicht open calls. The reputation of the Dutch photo organisation isn’t just based on the frequency of its festivals, but on intriguing and thoughtful curatorial subjects. Recent themes include: the entangled relationship between technology, ecology, and society; the accumulation of wealth by international conglomerates; and our ambiguous relationship with nature.

With its HQ in the Dutch city of Groningen, the main biennial Noorderlicht festival takes place across the northern Netherlands, extending into neighbouring regions of Friesland and Drenthe. The organisation, however, is far greater than the biennial projects, also encompassing a regular exhibition programme, education, publishing, and a print lab. Niemeyer, a vast former tobacco factory near the centre of Groningen, is slowly being reimagined into an urban campus of working, learning, and living, has provided the city with Thea, its newest photographic resource.




While Thea is separate from the main Noorderlicht organisation, there are ties. Both organisations are overseen by Roosje Klap, who has been director of Noorderlicht since 2024 and now also assumes the role of Cultural Development Lead for Niemeyer. The new space is set to last for at least two years, commencing with Thinking Hands, an exhibition focusing on knowledge within our bodies. In a world of expensive, polished, and starchitect-designed cultural venues, it is refreshing that Thea is a simple stripped-back shell. With no architectural airs and graces, the deep-plan industrial room simply offers space punctuated by concrete columns for curation. Such a space could be difficult for some curators, with few spatial hooks or details to help create the conditions of an exhibition, but for Thea’s opening show, Klap has filled the space with a variety of works with no prescribed route through the ideas.

Blown up onto a banner outside Thea, and then repeated as the first work encountered inside, are Paul Kooiker’s 2025 series Talking Hands. For New York Magazine, over 12 days, Kooiker photographed 57 of the most powerful people in US media. Each portrait is dominated by hand gestures whilst they are talking, the face of each subject receding into secondary importance behind contorted and intermingling fingers. Elsewhere, a 2023 music video for Dutch band De Jeugd van Tegenwoordig by the same photographer shows hands working clay – a translation of idea into form via rehearsal, repetition, intuition, and failure.



If it’s true that AI struggles to understand hands and that the mangled joints or too many fingers are a telltale sign that an image is not human-made, then perhaps hands are a great place to start looking for genuine human connection, empathy, and understanding – especially at a time when it seems technology is dehumanising and devaluing our qualities as people, however inefficient or clunky we may be.

Thea is a member of a consortium of 29 Groningen cultural institutions that recently stated that none would allow the use of smart glasses equipped with cameras and AI within their establishments and events, also asking people “not to normalise this technology”. That is not to say, however, that the organisation is formed of Dutch Luddites. “The space for technology is visibly growing in Groningen,” says Klap, “but how we can relate to it is still missing,” which is perhaps just as well considering that a firm sharing space in Niemeyer is an AI factory that has received support of €200 million from the EU and Dutch government.

In Thea’s deepest space, technology takes hold. Frode Oldereid and Thomas Kvam’s Requiem for an Exit (2024) is a four-metre-tall robot with a human face projection-mapped onto a dominating skull-like mass. While pistons and hydraulics manoeuvre the uncanny creature, its AI-synthesised voice delivers a monologue on humanity’s relentless pattern of genocide, destruction, and displacement. While initially scripted by the artists, to hear ourselves and our destructive proclivities echoed back to us via systems and structures of our making is haunting, and asks questions around whether technology itself is mankind’s existential threat, or whether it is the people who create and deploy that technology.



Another work reminds us of the ultimate owner-slave relationship today’s technology may lead to. In his work Wanderer (2025), Jan Robert Leegte has set an autonomous digital entity free into a map of the world, a blue dot slowly passing through landscapes and able to choose its own direction at any junction. While this situationist exercise may at first read as an e-flâneur free to choose its own adventure, we realise that it is contained within a world and urban fabric of our making. Instead of freedom, it feels trapped, trying to escape while contained and controlled within structures of a different time. What happens when it escapes, we may wonder.

Of course, if we believe the techbro boosterism, then within a few years the roles may reverse, and humanity might be the servile subject, at the whim of a technology and adjacent economy that sees the meatworld of the past a distraction, or worse an inconvenience to be overcome. Our late-capitalist structures seem to be expediting that process. Kiki Mager’s video 5000times (2016) extracts from footage made in smartphone factories, showing only forearms and hands as they assemble devices – 2,160 drops of solder, 3,927 applications of Kapton tape, 2,514 pieces of protective foil. The labour is transcribed into a choreography, it is beautiful and poetic, reminding us of the meticulous human skill behind the devices we swipe, stroke, and use to disappear into the ether.

But while this work acts to remind us of that craft, today – a decade later – head-mounted devices designed by the likes of Californian firms Human Archive and Microl are being used in factories across the developing world that produce machines, clothes, and disposable culture for the West. For a few pence more a day, workers record their repetitive motions in order that AI learns and trains itself to create better, smoother, more efficient systems. Systems without the inconvenience of humans. We have been here before. In the early 1800s, a wealthy factory owner could buy a loom, enabling him to get rid of ten workers and extract ever-more profit. Today, that factory owner might replace an entire regional economy at the flick of a switch.



“We eat, live, date, and dream with technology,” says Roosje Klap, "so it’s only right to ask critical questions about that.” This is noble, though the jury is out as to whether questions from art even meaningfully register in a world where the pace, power, and finance of technology dominate. At its best, perhaps, art offers a space for critical reflection, at its worst it offers a decorative fig leaf as society struggles.

Art can, at least, offer a platform for empathy – a human trait that increasingly feels like something alien to emergent technology and the men in California who programme it. Sorry I Gave Birth I Disappeared But Now I’m Back, by Andi Gáldi Vinkó, invites it from viewers. A series of images made between 2016 and 2022, when the artist concentrated on raising two children over her visual practice, is a medley not only of joy and life, but also pain, anxiety, and loneliness. Through the staged and documentary images, the artist hopes to show how messy and difficult motherhood is, something she had not seen in male-made images, and with the project hopes that “the years I’ve lost mothering can be written into my CV without guilt or shame”. If male-made images fail at such representation, then AI-made images, created by scraping a history of male-made images, will fail further.




Some artists remind us of the potential power humanity has over technology, should we collectively seek to rebalance the shifting power dynamics. Vera van der Burg trained an AI model on images of her own ceramic works whilst feeding it prompts such as “ceramic female pain” and “dry ceramic jealousy”. The artist then translated the AI-generated images of tangled forms created without any understanding of material or making by hand into 3D ceramic models, reclaiming into analogue what had been digested into digital.

A simpler gesture comes from Martina Bacigalupo, who in 2011 found a bin of photographs showing smartly dressed individuals in a photo studio but with offset white rectangles where their faces should be. These were discarded remnants of images after ID photos had been cut out for passports and documents, showing only posture, background, and presence. They invite us to wonder what lies outside the frame of all that is fed into technology, how much humanity we rely on to fully understand a person or situation is similarly discarded by processes that only see a small section of our shared existence.




The open call for 2027’s Noorderlicht Biennale has recently launched. It’s themed around PLAY!, and artists can submit work – either already made or a proposal for a new project – for consideration in the programme. In a sense, the theme continues questions raised in Thinking Hands. “Who determines the rules of the game, and who has the space to interpret, change, or refuse them?” asks the application text, raising future questions around power dynamics between analogue makers and digital creators. Photography is obviously excellently situated to raise such questions, the medium being rooted in technological knowledge, only 200 years old, and still seen by many (from within the photographic sector as well as outside it) as separate to art.

The final curation will take place in Groningen, Friesland, and Drenthe. However much technology claims to be a tool of connectivity, we have rapidly discovered that a connection rooted in staring into screens, alone, is one often antithetical to our human condition. Apps, platforms, and programmes may use (and abuse) the functions and mechanics of gamification and play to keep us scrolling and addicted, but the kinds of exhibitions put on by Noorderlicht, with a focus on experimentation, idea, and criticality, are perhaps the antidote we need to remind what it really means to connect, play, and think.

Institutions like this don’t need starchitect-designed venues, just a found concrete shell will do if the ideas and critical intent are sound. Set to expand in response to the building and programme over the next two years, resulting in 8,000 square metres of cultural space over three, Thea can become just that – and if some of the incoming technologists and industrialists happen to momentarily pop in to see an exhibition before returning to their coding, it may even help make a change.