The Humanness of Our Lonely Selves

Critically acclaimed for her psychological landscape images, Awoiska van der Molen presents a new body of work with understated black-and-white photos of built-up environments that reveal traces of human presence: she zooms in on illuminated windows in the darkness of the evening in Japan.

One could say that these windows function as a screen between the photographer (or the observer) and the world, between a psychological inner world and the external world of things. Through the windows, we catch a glimpse of the life behind them, yet there is no substantial contact. The windows serve as a barrier to the desire for safety and companionship as well as a glimpse of it. They simultaneously represent the longing for connection as well as comfort with distance. In this sense, the windows symbolise the existential loneliness that most of us must come to terms with to a greater or lesser degree.