SOM GALLERY is delighted to announce "Temps mort", a duo show by Sarah van Rij and David Van Der Leeuw on view from July 10 to August 9.

What does it mean to discover something?
Discovery is generally understood as the act of finding something previously unknown. Yet this definition seems to leave something unresolved. Gravity existed long before Newton. The world was extant before it was ever "discovered." And yet, at a certain moment, we began to call it a discovery. If the world itself had not changed, what was it that exactly dawned?

The world remains the same. What changes is our relationship to it. Perhaps what Newton discovered was not gravity itself, but the relationship between phenomena that had previously been understood as separate—the falling apple and the orbiting moon. Discovery, then, may not simply be the appearance of something new, but the moment in which an unseen relation comes into the specter of belief.

Film theory offers an intriguing concept through temps mort (dead time): moments that are detached from the causal progression of narrative. A figure looking out of a window or curtains moving gently in the wind - such scenes contribute little to the plot, yet they often become the moments we remember most vividly. They do not provide new information. Instead, as the flow of narrative temporarily recedes, light, space, and time themselves emerge from the background of experience.

In this sense, discovery is not the accumulation of information. It occurs when our relationship with the world is quietly reconfigured, when what had long remained in the background suddenly moves into the foreground of experience. Seen from this perspective, photography occupies a different position within contemporary art. While photography has long retained its documentary function, contemporary photographic practice increasingly asks how an image constructs experience and mediates our relationship with the world. The question is no longer simply what a photograph depicts, but how it allows us to experience what it depicts.

It is within this context that the work of van Rij and van der Leeuw can be situated. Their practice is not a critique of photography as a medium. Rather, drawing upon cinematic structures and temporal sensibilities, they create images that resist closure, allowing multiple narratives and associations to coexist. The subjects themselves are remarkably ordinary: cities, figures, flowers, windows, reflections, shadows. Yet these familiar motifs never settle into a single meaning. Instead, they remain in constant dialogue—between light and shadow, interior and exterior, reflection and reality, still-life and space. What unfolds within their photographs is not an event, but the continuous formation of relationships - images as ongoing encounters of the viewer's own memories and experiences.

Their photographs do not seek to offer new meanings. They resist the closure of meaning altogether.In doing so, they remind us that discovery is perhaps not the appearance of something previously unseen, but the renewed encounter with something that has always been there in the present.