About

Koen Hauser is an artist whose practice revolves around the transformation of images. Working with an archive of photographic reproductions collected from old books, he takes images out of their original contexts and transforms them through editing, visual reconfiguration and three-dimensional translation. These processes give rise to photographs, sculptures, videos, publications and installations in which familiar images acquire new forms, meanings and identities.
 
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Mythology of Perception

Rather than treating images as fixed representations of reality, Hauser approaches them as living matter, capable of shifting, accumulating meaning and taking on new forms. His transformations give rise to ambiguous figures, unfamiliar objects and seemingly autonomous configurations that evoke associations with ritual, science and the human body. Together, they form what Hauser describes as a mythology of perception: a world of images in which the boundaries between representation and reality, the familiar and the uncanny, become unstable.
 
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Current Research

His current research, Syntaxis Photognosis, explores transformation as both an artistic method and a way of thinking through images. Building on his longstanding intuitive approach to transforming historical photographs and illustrations, the project seeks to identify  and articulate the different operations through which images can acquire new forms, meanings and identities . His aim is to develop a visual system in which transformation becomes the central organizing principle.
 
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Biography

Koen Hauser (1972, NL)  studied social psychology at the University of Leiden and photography at the Royal Academy of Art and the Gerrit Rietveld Academy (2002).

Alongside his artistic practice, he has been active in applied photography until 2019. Hauser has lectured at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy, the Willem de Kooning Academy, and  at the Royal Academy of Art (KABK) in The Hague.

His work has been exhibited internationally at institutions and venues including Foam, Unseen Photo Fair, the Institut Néerlandais in Paris and the He Xiang Ning Art Museum in Shenzhen. 
 
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