inez van lamsweerde and vinoodh matadin

THE FOREST

A major retrospective devoted to Inez van Lamsweerde and Vinoodh Matadin is taking place at the Kunstmuseum Den Haag in The Hague from March 21 to September 6, 2026.

Titled “Can Love Be a Photograph,” the exhibition traces four decades of their artistic partnership.

Our ideas around this series of men called The Forest, created in 1995,  can be outlined as follows. This series goes straight to the heart of our recurring interest in how gender, desire, and identity are performed and mediated. The Forest is a particularly lucid example of how the traditionally “masculine” body can be used to explore fragility, surrender, and hybridity in the late-20th-century image economy.

1. The Feminization of the Male Body

In The Forest, men appear serene, eyes closed, faces softened by a faint smile — but their hands have been digitally replaced with female ones: elegant, manicured, performatively “feminine.”

This…