Some exhibitions do not seek to explain, but to evoke feeling. Presented at the Fotografiemuseum Amsterdam (Foam), "You Don't Look Sick" is part of this sensitive approach where experience takes precedence over discourse.
You Don't Look Sick, Self-Portrait No3 2025 © Jasmijn Vermeeren
As part of the Foam 3h program, this first solo exhibition by Jasmijn Vermeeren offers an intimate immersion into the reality of people living with an invisible illness or disability. Through photography, video, and sculpture, the Dutch artist transforms her lived experience into a space for sharing, recognition, and questioning social norms related to the body, health, and identity.
The exhibition's title, "You Don't Look Sick," echoes a common phrase, often uttered without malice, but laden with preconceptions. It encapsulates the paradox faced by people living with chronic pain or invisible disabilities: the constant need to justify suffering that cannot be seen. Drawing on her own experience of chronic pain, Jasmijn Vermeeren sheds light on a still largely unexplored aspect of contemporary discussions on diversity and inclusion.
The exhibition unfolds like a personal narrative, without ever becoming purely autobiographical. The works do not seek to illustrate a diagnosis, but rather to convey a feeling, a state, a constant tension between what the body experiences and what society perceives. Photographic self-portraits occupy a central place. Fragmented, altered, sometimes almost dislocated, they present a face that seems simultaneously familiar and foreign. The viewer's gaze is confronted with an unstable identity, constantly recomposing itself, far removed from any fixed image of normality.
In these images, the body becomes a territory of negotiation. The cuts, superimpositions, and visual distortions evoke both physical pain and the mental burden of being judged by others. Vermeeren does not seek to provoke, but rather to create a space of recognition, where vulnerability is neither aestheticized nor concealed. She invites the viewer to observe, to accept the ambiguity and discomfort that these works may elicit.
This approach extends to the sculptural works and installations, which bring an almost corporeal dimension to the exhibition. The volumes, textures, and materials prolong the reflection on presence and absence, on what is visible and what is not. The body is never represented as a stable object, but as a process, traversed by contradictory tensions: strength and fragility, exposure and protection, affirmation and effacement.
Jasmijn Vermeeren identifies as "crip," a term reclaimed by some communities to encompass various forms of disability (physical, mental, sensory, or cognitive) while simultaneously reversing the negative connotations historically associated with these realities. By adopting this position, the artist challenges conventional notions of functionality, productivity, and normality. Going beyond simply depicting an individual experience, "You Don't Look Sick" interrogates the social frameworks that define what is acceptable, credible, or legitimate.
Far from being didactic, the exhibition favors an emotional and sensory approach. Visitors are invited into a space where emotions are welcomed without hierarchy, where fatigue, anger, tenderness, and ambivalence all find their place. This intimacy creates a rare form of closeness that goes beyond simple empathy to open up a broader space for reflection on listening and recognition.
Presented as part of the Florentine Riem Vis grant, of which Jasmijn Vermeeren is the ninth recipient, the exhibition marks a significant milestone in the artist's career. The program, dedicated to supporting emerging artists, finds particular resonance here, affirming a unique, committed, and profoundly contemporary voice capable of transforming personal experience into a universal artistic language.
“You Don’t Look Sick” invites us to reconsider our reflexes, judgments, and relationship to bodies that don’t conform to dominant narratives. By making visible what is usually ignored, Jasmijn Vermeeren opens a space for necessary dialogue, where being oneself becomes an act that is both intimate and political.
"You Don't Look Sick"
Foam (Foam 3h)
Keizersgracht 609, Amsterdam (Netherlands)
Until 25 May 2026
