“I find a quiet joy in witnessing photographic images respond, transform, and reveal their own kind of magic. I work with images the way one listens to echoes – not to recover the past, but to let it reshape itself into something that speaks to the present. To me images are not representations but experiences, vibrating with meanings that surface before language.
Biography
Koen Hauser (1972, NL) is a visual artist whose work departs from the photographic image as a stable representation and treats it as a mutable substance. Rather than producing images, he develops processes through which images disintegrate, mutate, and re-emerge as tactile and affective configurations.
What unfolds is a mythology of perception.
Hauser’s practice spans across photography, video, publications, installations and sculpture. He works with historical images, mostly drawn from his archive of photographic reproductions from old books. Through acts of translation and material reconfiguration, images are displaced from their original contexts and re-articulated as visual structures that render psychological processes tangible. These take form in installations that function as environments in which processes of perception are both represented and experienced through sensory encounter.
Underlying this practice are recurring themes of transformation — of bodies, appearances and states of being — often touching on notions of distortion and vulnerability. The work carries an undercurrent shaped by personal history, where experiences of loss and estrangement resonate in the material itself. Here the image becomes a site where such tensions can surface and reorganize.
Trained initially as a social psychologist at Leiden University, and later in photography at the Royal Academy of Art and the Gerrit Rietveld Academy, Hauser’s practice operates between perception, knowledge, and the cult of the image, where psychological inquiry and material transformation converge.
He has worked extensively with institutional archives, including the Nationaal Archief, Kunstmuseum Den Haag, and the Rijksmuseum, where historical material becomes the starting point for new configurations rather than an object of documentation. His publications, including De Luister van het Land (in collaboration with Bart de Baets), extend this practice into the book as a spatial and temporal medium.
Hauser’s work has been exhibited internationally at venues such as FOAM, Unseen Photo Fair, Institut Néerlandais, and the He Xiang Ning Art Museum, and is held in public and private collections including Kunstmuseum Den Haag and the Houston Center for Photography.
Alongside his artistic practice, Hauser has been active in education, teaching at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy, the Willem de Kooning Academy, and currently at the Royal Academy of Art (KABK) in The Hague.
Koen Hauser (1972, NL) is a visual artist whose work departs from the photographic image as a stable representation and treats it as a mutable substance. Rather than producing images, he develops processes through which images disintegrate, mutate, and re-emerge as tactile and affective configurations.
What unfolds is a mythology of perception.
Hauser’s practice spans across photography, video, publications, installations and sculpture. He works with historical images, mostly drawn from his archive of photographic reproductions from old books. Through acts of translation and material reconfiguration, images are displaced from their original contexts and re-articulated as visual structures that render psychological processes tangible. These take form in installations that function as environments in which processes of perception are both represented and experienced through sensory encounter.
Underlying this practice are recurring themes of transformation — of bodies, appearances and states of being — often touching on notions of distortion and vulnerability. The work carries an undercurrent shaped by personal history, where experiences of loss and estrangement resonate in the material itself. Here the image becomes a site where such tensions can surface and reorganize.
Trained initially as a social psychologist at Leiden University, and later in photography at the Royal Academy of Art and the Gerrit Rietveld Academy, Hauser’s practice operates between perception, knowledge, and the cult of the image, where psychological inquiry and material transformation converge.
He has worked extensively with institutional archives, including the Nationaal Archief, Kunstmuseum Den Haag, and the Rijksmuseum, where historical material becomes the starting point for new configurations rather than an object of documentation. His publications, including De Luister van het Land (in collaboration with Bart de Baets), extend this practice into the book as a spatial and temporal medium.
Hauser’s work has been exhibited internationally at venues such as FOAM, Unseen Photo Fair, Institut Néerlandais, and the He Xiang Ning Art Museum, and is held in public and private collections including Kunstmuseum Den Haag and the Houston Center for Photography.
Alongside his artistic practice, Hauser has been active in education, teaching at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy, the Willem de Kooning Academy, and currently at the Royal Academy of Art (KABK) in The Hague.