Positions: Unearthing

Stroom Den Haag proudly presents the exhibition Positions: Unearthing, an anniversary edition in which four artists from The Hague - Roger Anis, Marie Civikov, Priyageetha Dia, Ben Yau - bring to light hidden stories, memories, and perspectives that have long remained invisible.

With a human and investigative approach, the artists delve into personal archives and forgotten history that is in danger of disappearing. What the artists uncover connects individual experiences with broader social narratives that still resonate today.

Priyageetha Dia uses AI-generated images and sounds to give a voice back to plantation workers who have disappeared from collective memory. Ben Yau reconstructs the events surrounding the Batang Kali massacre (1948) based on declassified documents and testimonies. Roger Anis focuses on local, ritualistic approaches surrounding the Nile to reveal new perspectives on resistance, solidarity, and ecological care, while Marie Civikov transforms her grandmother's legacy into a source from which new family stories emerge.

Positions: Unearthing brings forgotten or suppressed stories to light, thereby not only enriching our view of the past, but also helping us to find new forms of connection.

Roger Anis is an Egyptian documentary photographer and visual artist and researcher. Anis began his career as a photojournalist in 2010, working with Egyptian newspapers and international news agencies. His work has been published in major outlets such as the Associated Press (AP), Agence France-Presse (AFP), Getty Images, The New York Times, TIME, The Wall Street Journal, Newsweek, Le Monde, De Groene Amsterdammer, The Guardian, and others. He has also collaborated with international organisations, including UNICEF, UNDP, UNFPA, and UN Women. His photography has been exhibited in Egypt and internationally at the Institut du Monde Arabe (France), the Hermitage Museum (Russia), the MUCEM Museum (France), The GEM Grand Egyptian Museum (Egypt), Head On Photo Festival (Australia), Bamako Biennale (Mali), and other venues across Turkey, the USA, Singapore, India, and the Netherlands.

The work of Roger Anis focuses on social and environmental issues, particularly hidden or underreported stories within communities. His long-term projects often address themes such as water, environment, identity, and displacement. In his practice, he experiments with multiple visual media, from visual research to photography and filmmaking. He is also the Artistic Director and Co-founder of the EverydayNile Initiative, which empowers visual storytellers from the Nile Basin countries to document and share stories about the Nile and water in their communities.

Marie Civikov (1979) is a visual artist, organizer, and educator, living and working in The Hague. In her visual art practice, she is primarily active as a painter and was awarded the Royal Award for Modern Painting in 2011. In her work, she relates her personal family history to ethical issues of descent, history, and family ties in both an (Eastern) European and Eurasian context. In addition to her individual practice, she has collaborated with performance artist Voin de Voin, with whom she founded  Æther Haga, a platform in The Hague for exchange with Æther Art Space in Sofia (BG), run by Voin de Voin. Civikov’s work is regularly shown in various institutions, exhibitions, galleries and biennials, nationally and internationally.

Priyageetha Dia works with time-based media and installation. Her practice braids themes of Southeast Asian labour histories, speculation in the tropics, and ancestral memory meeting machine logics. Through archival and field research, she explores nonlinearity and practices of refusal against dominant narratives.

Recent exhibitions include 4th Bangkok Art Biennale (2024); Manifesta 15, Barcelona (2024); 60th La Biennale di Venezia, Venice (2024); Arts House, Melbourne (2024); Diriyah Biennale, Saudi Arabia (2024); Frieze Seoul (2023); Singapore Art Museum (2023); Kochi-Muziris Biennale, Kerala, India (2022); La Trobe Art Institute, Australia (2022); National Gallery Singapore (2020); and Art Science Museum, Singapore (2019). She was artist-in-residence at the NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore in 2022 and the SEA AiR-Studio Residencies at the Jan van Eyck Academie in the Netherlands in 2023.

Ben Yau (b.1992, Glasgow) is a Chinese-Scots visual artist based in The Hague, NL. He graduated from MA Photography & Society at the Royal Academy of Art, The Hague, in 2023 and from Camberwell College of Arts in Fine Art Photography in 2019. That same year, he was selected for Bloomberg New Contemporaries as well as Creekside Open. Selected exhibitions include solo presentations In the Shadow of Ashes, The Balcony (The Hague 2024), Proximate Currents: When Everything Fuses Together, Iniva (online/London 2020); and group exhibitions The London Open, Whitechapel Gallery (London 2022), Bloomberg New Contemporaries, Leeds Art Gallery, and South London Gallery, (2019).

His work emerges from historiographical research of othered narratives: the repression of certain histories, and the imperial operations that are conducted to this end. These narratives are often left out of official accounts of history, and therefore demand a multi-modal approach beyond the scope of conventional institutions of history. This approach involves intervening in, mediating, and countering the archive, utilising the generative ambiguities of artistic research. From research-led processes, he engages with diverse materials including declassified intelligence documents, archival films, and newspaper clippings.

About Positions:
Positions, which will celebrate its fifth anniversary in 2026, has grown into an essential platform for experimentation, research, and social engagement in The Hague. With each edition, Positions emphasizes that art is an active part of society: a place where artists raise new questions, where social discussions are deepened, and where other ways of living together are explored. The platform offers creators the space to develop long-term projects, explore urgent themes, and forge new connections between art and the city. Previous exhibitions were Positions: Gut Feeling (2025), Positions: Soft Intimacies (2024) Positions: Afterlives (event) (2023/4), Positions: Elsewheres (2023), and Positions: Time-Based (2022).

The exhibition Positions: Unearthing is made possible thanks to the support of the City of The Hague.