3 – 6 July 2025

Master students of the Lens-Based Media programme at the Piet Zwart Institute invite you to their graduation show at V2_ and WORM, Rotterdam.

Squaring the circle

​In geometry, when people speak of ‘squaring the circle’, they are talking about the challenge of constructing a square with the exact surface area of a circle. You can only use a finite number of steps and nothing more than a compass and a straightedge. It has long been proven to be impossible, and yet, many keep trying.

Every time you pick up a camera, you are faced with a similar problem. A circular lens gathers light onto a square sensor, film or image plate. What happens in between is imperfect. The world on one side of the lens is never entirely translated to the other.

That is where we come in. Although we know very well that it is impossible, we keep trying. We keep picking up our cameras to represent the world in front of it. Push it through these shapes, the circles, the squares. To make it fit, we alter what we see. We devise new ways to capture our reality, make new decisions in how and why we frame it. We don’t just gather the light, we distribute it again. And somewhere in the process, we realise that we were never trying to make anything fit, but to come up with different shapes altogether. That we were discovering the many worlds already hiding inside the frame.

You cannot make a square out of a circle, but you can circle a square. That is where you come in. We invite you to walk around the frames, look at the images, at our lives and experiences from different angles. What shapes can you find in there? How do the stories move? How do you move them?

Squaring the Circle is running from 3 to 6 July 2025.

Opening times
Opening: Thursday 3 July: 18:00 – 22:30h
Friday 4 July: 12:00–21:00h
Saturday 5 July: 12:00–18:00h
Sunday 6 July: 12:00–18:00h

Where
V2_Lab for the Unstable Media, Eendrachtsstraat 10 & UBIK/WORM, Boomgaardsstraat 69, Rotterdam

Participating Artists
Annemiek Höcker
Aratrika Keshan
Bojan Salaj
Chanwoo Song
Dominique Westphal
Giorgos Achilleos
Luca Neumann
Jingfeng Shen
Nihal Goel
Noura Rabbani
Riccardo Santalucia
Rodolfo Ferro
Tessa Langeveld
Tesse Baardman
Tom Parolin
Yana Lineva