Merette Uiterwaal (b. 1990, Amsterdam Zuid-Oost, NL) explores what happens when the dominant visual system proves unreliable.

Photography forms the core of her practice, not as a medium of documentation, but as a way to register and question what is understood as visual “truth.” Her work departs from the assumption that vision is stable, shared, and objective. Color is not treated as neutral information, but as a normative system that defines what counts as seeing correctly. Uiterwaal’s color blindness is not a limitation, but a rupture that exposes visual consensus as fragile and perception as contingent, provisional, and constructed.

Through experimental printing techniques and material translations, she presents photographic images in ways that resist immediate recognition as photographs. Prints dissolve into painterly, almost watercolor-like surfaces, or become graphic and abstract when mounted on lightboxes. These shifts are not stylistic gestures, but strategies to loosen photography from its claim to objectivity and indexical truth. What is registered by the camera is reworked until it hovers between image, surface, and sensation.

Sound and mixed media function as extensions of this photographic logic. Audio works are developed from visual material, translating images into temporal and sensory experiences, further destabilizing the primacy of sight. Across her practice, photography becomes less a tool for representation and more a system to be questioned, stretched, and reconfigured.

Uiterwaal treats perceptual difference as method. By foregrounding uncertainty, she opens a space in which seeing becomes an active and interpretive act rather than a fixed truth. Her work does not offer alternative certainties, but invites sustained attention to the instability of perception itself, where looking becomes an experience of questioning, slippage, and possibility.