Verdwijnende Vogels van Amsterdam Tom van Veen in dialogue with Pieter Numan

At the center of Tom van Veen's new body of work is a bird most people have never seen. The nightjar moves at dusk, hides in bark and moss, and only reveals itself to those who learn to look differently.

Verdwijnende Vogels van Amsterdam brings together paintings, field excursions, and ecological research into a project that is as much about urban communities as it is about wildlife. Working with ecologist Pim ter Laan, Van Veen went in search of a bird that survives by becoming invisible. The palette follows: earth, bark, rust, grey-brown, twilight. Camouflage is not deception here but strategy, a way of protecting oneself, adapting, and waiting. When a species vanishes, something else becomes audible: a longing for place, for shared attention, for a more reciprocal relationship with the landscape. A longing that grows sharper as digital environments increasingly stand between us and the natural world.

Responding to this work, photographer Pieter Numan presents Field Study as part of the exhibition. Using a thermal imaging camera, originally developed for military surveillance, Numan photographs people wearing camouflage and gorpcore clothing. Garments that borrow from nature, that perform a kind of belonging. But the thermal camera strips all of that away. It reads heat alone. The brand, the silhouette, the carefully constructed image: gone. What remains is a body. A presence without context, without story, without the social markers we use to define and protect ourselves. Identity, reduced to warmth.

That erasure is the point. In a world where the digital layer shapes how we see and how we are seen, the camera offers a different kind of vision: one that does not recognise, does not categorise, does not scroll past. Where Van Veen seeks out the bird and learns to look differently, Numan turns that gaze around. The human becomes the observed. The animal world offers no answers. It offers a mirror.

The opening is this Friday, 21 June, from 16:00 to 21:00. The exhibition runs until 26 June at Chillzone, van Diemenstraat 410, Amsterdam.