Collage

 invite children aged 8 to 12 to join the 

 this winter. Inspired by Viviane Sassen’s exhibition, participants will get hands-on with the camera and learn to see art and colour in a new way. To complete the festive experience, there will be plenty of time to enjoy hot chocolate and Christmas bread.

Foam

Kerstvakantie: Workshop Collage Maken

Mooncake, Foam Café, Amsterdam

Spread from Chinees-Indisch Stickeralbum

Cahier for Benjamin Li's In Search of Perfect Orange - Chinese Version

Chinese version

Liz Johnson Artur - of life of love of sex of movement of hope, 2021

In Search of Perfect Orange. About the work of Benjamin Li

Foam presents a deep dive into the archives of Dutch artist duo Blommers & Schumm, offering an in-depth look at over 25 years of their playful and provocative image-making.

The exhibition brings together highlights from their remarkable career, including iconic photographs featured in publications such as Fantastic Man, The Gentlewoman, Dazed & Confused, Self Service, Purple, AnOther Magazine, and The New York Times Magazine. 

Josefine wearing Bless, Styling Georgia Pendlebury for Exhibition magazine 2018

Blommers & Schumm

From the Archive:  Establishing Eden by Persijn Broersen & Margit Lukács

Khashayar's home studio in Lausanne, 2025. Courtesy of the artist

Khashayar's home studio in Lausanne, 2025

Archival material: digitising negatives from The Caspian

From the series The Caspian by Khashayar Javanmardi

Studio Visit: Khashayar Javanmardi

From the series I Do Miss Hospital Visit

Shwe Wutt Hmon

On Thursday, 15 January, Foam presents a special evening with 

 who have been invited to develop a dance performance in dialogue with the exhibition by 

In their practice, Lunatics and Poets explore how gestures, movements and objects acquire meaning. Their approach resonates with recurring themes within the oeuvre of Blommers & Schumm, including desire, transformation and the shifting boundaries of fashion.

Performance by Lunatics and Poets

The Flicker Phase, 1950

Breath and Sway: Ode to Blommers en Schumm

Students of Tsinghua University showing their prestige with an a4 white paper.

Xin Li

. During this special occasion, the photographers will share the stories behind the photographs, giving us a unique insight into the creative process behind these surrealistic images.

The Desk for Mac Guffin 2020

Everyday objects for Baron Magazine, 2012

Artist Tours: Blommers & Schumm on Mid-Air

From the series POST, 2023

Sander Coers

Annegret Soltau, With Myself, 1975/2022

On Our Radar: Annegret Soltau

From the series Blaze Orange / High Visibility

Jaclyn Wright

and discover their world from up close. In these exclusive workshops you’ll collaborate on a new artwork together with the artists.

Through playful experiments with light, materials, and spatial objects, you’ll create an uncanny composition that challenges what feels familiar. An inspiring experience where experimentation, collaboration, and imagination take the lead.

Nella for buffalo magazine, styling Harry Lambert, 2019

Blommers/Schumm

Merkelbach Studio, Stadsarchief, 2013

Shifted Perspectives Studio Blommers & Schumm

Hlala Nami by Thato Toeba. Courtesy the artist

On Our Radar: Thato Toeba

Opening of Loading... Works from the Foam Collection

Our mission

Description

Pink Ladies and Pear, 2012

as a Foam Member

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Wedding day from the series Las Flores mueren dos veces, 2022

Louis Vuitton Jeff Koons Rubens Bag, 2020

From the series Home Leaving One for Another

"Mohlokomedi wa Tora", Scene 2, 2018 

Killa from the series Madre

In a sandstone mine 1 from the series This isn't Divide and Conquer

Dialect, 2020

authenticity (2 CHAINZ) from the series BLACK SNAFU, 2022

Wait from the series We Didn't Choose to be Born Here, 2022

Foam Magazine

Opening of Tyler Mitchell, photo by Almicheal Fraay

About

Depredations, from the photobook Radiations of War, 2025, by Yana Kononova. Courtesy the artist.

Test of Time: Daria Tuminas

 is the well-known Photoshop selection tool of the same name. For Xin Li, the tool is much more than a handy feature to edit images. It becomes a means to draw parallels with societal control and censorship during the COVID lockdowns in China.  

The magic wand tool selects areas of images based on colour and hue—allowing smart selection and quick manipulation of images. Enforced with machine learning, it nowadays easily predicts which objects a user would like to see selected. Xin Li uses the tool to distort images, obscuring their original meaning behind layers of other images, often of other artworks.  

For Xin Li, this process symbolises the mechanisms of hiding and revealing facts and fake news, regulating the flow of information and controlling the dominant narrative. Metaphorically captured in the overwhelming fusion of shapes and colours, the visually explosive works tempt the viewer to look what lies beneath the apparent chaos. 

Stuck at home during the COVID-19 lockdown, Shwe Wutt Hmon was unable to visit the hospital for her regular check-ups and scans, necessary because of a life-long health issue. Coming to terms with this limitation, she started scanning her body, as well as flowers and medical records, by herself with an ordinary at-home scanner, creating a variety of abstract self-portraits. 

 that emerged from these experiments, reveal a poetic and symbolic documentation of the ongoing assault of medical procedures and operations on her body. Hmon’s image-making practice strongly ties together process and concept: the withering flowers symbolise the decay of the body and dark colours reflect somber emotions experienced right before scheduled operations.  

Another dimension was added when she moved from Myanmar to Thailand in 2022. Printing her work on local Saa paper, the works received an almost skin-like texture. Again, restrictions–this time due to the delicate paper type–required her to improvise, causing her to print the works small scale at home. The final accumulated process turned out to present a healing capacity: by carefully printing, cutting and sewing her works together, Shwe ultimately was also mending herself.

How does a photograph shape our understanding of the past? 

 is a series of A.I.-generated images, combined with archival images, questioning the construction of memory and masculinity through our image culture. 

In an attempt to grasp the full story of his deceased grandfather and his Indonesian heritage, Sander Coers turned to the artificial intelligence programme 

Feeding archival family photos into its system, he asked the programme to describe them, specifically listing their technical details such as dominant colour tones and type of camera, film and lens. Altering these descriptions allowed Sander to prompt the programme to create new images, yet maintain the exact visual look and feel of the family snapshots. Finally, by blending multiple A.I.-generated images together with the originals, he created a surprisingly intimate, genuine, yet completely fictional family album. 

The way the photos are cropped stands out. Coers used an element of collaging when assembling the final images, in order to emphasise the constructed nature of the photographs, and ultimately, the constructed nature of one’s memory, too. 

 alludes to the ‘afterlife’ of his grandfather, through the photo albums he left behind, as well as to the realm of post-photography: a space where images can be generated without the use of a camera.  

Adobe Stock image

Image from the series POST, 2023

From the series POST

The West Desert, located on the western shore of the Great Salt Lake in Utah (USA), is the ancestral home of the indigenous Goshute people. Though officially public lands, managed by the Bureau of Land Management, this area is largely used for various privatised or military purposes, ranging from mining operations, testing grounds for weapons and improvised gun ranges.  

, Jaclyn Wright visited these cluttered sites, full of discarded targets and shattered clay pigeons. The bullet-holed remains, which she collected, photographed and filmed, are pieced together into performative installations, that reflect on the colonisation of ancient lands by bureaucratic systems.  

By inserting herself into the scene, wearing a skintight bodysuit made out of orange clay pigeons, Wright comments on the hyper-masculine culture of land dominance and cowboy fantasies. The synthetic orange colour becomes symbolic: used to enhance visibility, it signifies the strong opposition and rejection of its natural environment. 

Untitled (BLM arrows I)

From the series High Visibility (Blaze Orange)

Antelope Island (Utah) Buffalo Hunt photograph collection, Digital MSSC782, No. 6, Altered

L. Clyde Anderson photograph collection (1910- 1959), P0158, Box 1, Folder 27, Altered

Charles James Neal photograph collection (1900 - 1920s), P0694, Box 1, Folder 4, Altered

The West Desert is located on the western side of the Great Salt Lake [UT, United States]. Historically, this area has been documented through photography and land surveys, supporting the violent exploitation of the landscape. 

Archives, II

Untitled (grid)

Nearly one-third of the West Desert's 7.7 million acres are used as biological and chemical weapons testing grounds. The remaining areas of the West Desert are open to various uses, including improvised gun ranges.

Collected Targets

Collected Targets, from the series High Visibility (Blaze Orange)

L. Clyde Anderson photograph collection (1910- 1959), P0158, Box 1, Folder 6, Altered

Stansbury Island, the second largest island in the Great Salt Lake, echoes with gunfire and is littered with bullet holes, clay pigeons and improvised targets. The Bureau of Land Management refers to this detritus as "trigger trash".

Found Clay Pigeons

Archives, V

After encountering the powerful texts of psychiatrist Frantz Fanon on the fight against colonial injustice, a series of questions emerged inside Issam Larkat’s mind. Who was Frantz Fanon and how did he become a crucial figure in the liberation of Algeria, as well as the broader movement of decolonialisation? How relevant are his words after seventy years? And, which questions would Fanon have asked in today’s society? 

Frantz Fanon (1925-1961) was an important figure in the global struggle against colonialism during the 1950s, also known under the adopted Islamic name Omar Ibrahim, and recognised for his publications 

(1961). Born on the Caribbean island Martinique, under French colonial rule, Fanon educated as a psychiatrist in France. After the Algerian Revolution in 1954, he joined the National Liberation Front and continued to fight for the freedom of many African nations, including Algeria, until his death in 1961.

Inspired by the profound legacy of Fanon’s visionary ideas, Issam Larkat’s series 

pays a tribute to his thinking by using a distinct style that combines photographs, archival images and hand-made drawings. Larkat cleverly translates his questions into critical collages that depart from his own experience in Algeria, yet simultaneously speak to the universal struggle against injustice and (neo-)colonialism, connecting the shared identities of Algerian, African and Arab people. 

From the series Frantz Fanon, Me, and The Questions

Issam Larkat

is a close observation of performance in everyday life. Which roles do we act out on a daily basis and how does that influence our identities? Using the metaphor of the theatre to separate private (

) spheres, Eleonora Agostini studies her mother’s behaviours, gestures and expressions in her job as a waitress. 

Puzzling together photographs, archival images, moving images and texts into various collages, Eleonora Agostini breaks down the layers of performance one by one, revealing the repetitiveness of gestures, habits and adopted mannerisms used in serving clients.  

The work is also a commentary on the feminist theory of the “gaze”. The restaurant becomes the space where her mother is both the observer and the observed, where parts of her public behaviour as a waitress bleed into her private behaviour of being an individual, woman, and mother. Through her project, Agostini examines this relationship between the female body and the different social roles it performs in different spaces. 

From the series A Study on Waitressing

Eleonora Agostini

Unidentified flying objects, ships floating above the water or identical strangers: the internet holds a vast collection of real-world ‘glitches’: errors or optical illusions that occur in the world around us but cannot be explained rationally. Inspired by movies like 

, these puzzling phenomena spark online discussion, often satirical, about whether we might exist in a simulation, rather than the real world.

, artist duo Andrea Orejarena and Caleb Stein look exactly at this blurry line between fact and fiction, fuelled by the overwhelming flow of images coming our way through our screens on a daily basis. The artists treat the internet as a collective subconscious where evidence for real-life glitches is constantly posted, shared, and reshared. 

The large collection of found internet footage that they built over the years inspired them to search for sites across the United States that reminded them of such glitches. The resulting series of serene yet uncanny landscape photography leave the viewer in an unsettling space, confused between what might be real and what might be fake.

Syntethic Street Collage

Found footage from the series American Glitch

Abraham Lincoln and Drone from the series American Glitch, 2021

Real Bird in Fake Tree, 2022. From the series American Glitch

Desert Facade 1, 2022. From the series American Glitch

Egg Glitch. From the series American Glitch

Very Large Array, New Mexico. From the series American Glitch

Life on Mars Training Simulation, 2021. From the series American Glitch

From the project American Glitch

Cloud Glitch, 2021. From the series American Glitch

Desert Firing Range, 2022. From the series American Glitch

Fake Training Battle in Replica Iraqi Village

From the series American Glitch

Herndon Climb, 2023. From the series American Glitch

California City Paper Roads, Aerial View 1 of 9, 2022. From the series American Glitch

Andrea Orejarena & Caleb Stein

Dine Dine Khasiya Paribe

 is a visual folktale, following the tunes of local songs from the Rajbanshi community in Assam and Bengal, India. Historically, this community has continuously been mis-identified and culturally erased through the crushing weight of colonial bureaucracy. The series documents Akshay Mahajan’s journey in search for what ‘identity’ truly is.

Growing up in Mumbai as a child of the Indian partition, without any knowledge of his own heritage, Akshay Mahajan attempted to construct a new identity: not by birth, but through love. Folksongs, sung by his wife, drew him to north-eastern India, to the Rajbanshi people—bringing back to live a cultural tradition on the brink of obscurity. 

The resulting works are an intuitive and associative exploration about the meaning of ‘identity’. The use of the collaging technique refers to the constructed nature of identity, as something that is continually challenged and reassembled. Mahajan explains: “We are all people of clay, our identities constantly changing, not chained by the borders we have inherited.”

Listen to "Dine Dine Khasiya Paribe" by clicking the play button at the bottom of the exhibition.

collage

Collage

Christmas Holiday: Fashion Photography Workshop

In Search of Perfect Orange
About the work of Benjamin Li

Blommers & Schumm Mid-Air

Establishing Eden by Persijn Broersen & Margit Lukács

Studio Visit: Khashayar Javanmardi

Shwe Wutt Hmon

Dance Performance Breath and Sway: A Tribute to Blommers and Schumm

Xin Li

Artist Tour:
Blommers & Schumm on Mid-Air

Sander Coers

With Myself by Annegret Soltau

Jaclyn Wright

Shifted Perspectives
In-Studio workshop by Blommers & Schumm

Hlala Nami by Thato Toeba

About

Test of Time: Depredations by Yana Kononova

Xin Li

Shwe Wutt Hmon

Sander Coers

Jaclyn Wright

Issam Larkat

Eleonora Agostini

Andrea Orejarena & Caleb Stein

Akshay Mahajan

collage

Collage

Christmas Holiday: Fashion Photography Workshop

In Search of Perfect OrangeAbout the work of Benjamin Li

Blommers & Schumm Mid-Air

Establishing Eden by Persijn Broersen & Margit Lukács

Studio Visit: Khashayar Javanmardi

Shwe Wutt Hmon

Dance Performance Breath and Sway: A Tribute to Blommers and Schumm

Xin Li

Artist Tour:Blommers & Schumm on Mid-Air

Sander Coers

With Myself by Annegret Soltau

Jaclyn Wright

Shifted PerspectivesIn-Studio workshop by Blommers & Schumm

Hlala Nami by Thato Toeba

About

Test of Time: Depredations by Yana Kononova

Xin Li

Shwe Wutt Hmon

Sander Coers

Jaclyn Wright

Issam Larkat

Eleonora Agostini

Andrea Orejarena & Caleb Stein

Akshay Mahajan

In Search of Perfect Orange
About the work of Benjamin Li

Artist Tour:
Blommers & Schumm on Mid-Air

Shifted Perspectives
In-Studio workshop by Blommers & Schumm