If violence is documented, archived, and condemned, why does it return?
On 20 July 1917, U.S. Secretary of War Newton D. Baker was blindfolded and reached into a glass bowl. He drew the number 258, the first number in a national draft lottery that would determine the order in which millions of young men could be called to fight in Europe. War reduced a life to a number. Who would be needed, and for what, was decided by chance.
Blindfolded begins there.
More than a century later, war has returned to Europe’s political imagination. Three days after Russia’s full scale invasion of Ukraine, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz named the rupture a Zeitenwende: a turning point in which assumptions about peace, security and military power could no longer be taken for granted. Even the language of war has returned. In the United States, the title Secretary of War, discarded after the Second World War, has returned. Pete Hegseth is now Secretary of War.
Blindfolded places these moments against one another: a world in which the state once selected bodies by lottery, and a world in which bodies can increasingly be read through data.
At the intersection of déjà vu and amnesia, Blindfolded gives form to the return of war through photography and installation.
The photographs begin with chance.
Each portrait is paired with a single image selected at random from Ria Verhaeghe’s Provisoria , an archive of approximately 30,000 photographs collected from international newspapers over more than two decades. One image, from roughly 30,000 possibilities.
Through double exposure, half of the portrait is brought together with this archival image. The algorithm does not search for resemblance, relevance or a shared history. It simply selects.
The process echoes the lottery at the origin of Blindfolded. The encounter is decided before meaning exists. Only afterwards do the two images begin to speak to one another, creating connections neither image carried on its own.
The installation begins where chance ends.
Visitors enter their name and allow their portrait to be taken. The system searches the digital traces available about them and uses what it finds to connect them to a historical war photograph from the Imperial War Museum in London.
The structure echoes the 1917 draft lottery, but its logic has changed. Then, selection depended on blindness: the state knew almost nothing about the person behind the number. Today, our lives leave behind vast amounts of data, held, processed and interpreted by systems designed to know us.
A face from the present is placed against a body from the past. Blindfolded asks what happens when the lottery is no longer blind. Who decides what a person is useful for when war returns: the state, the algorithm, or the corporations that hold our data?
The question is no longer only what these systems know about us, but what that knowledge makes possible. Systems built to identify, predict and classify can also assign value, risk and purpose. What happens when technologies designed to know us become capable of deciding where we belong and what we might be used for?
Blindfolded I - The Lottery, Mutation Festival, Wintercircus, Ghent, 20–22 November 2026 Upcoming
Blindfolded I - The Lottery, Grand Hospice, Brussels, 7–14 September 2026
Blindfolded I - The Lottery, Group Exhibition, La Escocesa, Barcelona, 30 June–4 July 2026
