To the finder the spoils
Wesley Doran
HKU Utrecht School Of The Arts
To the Finder the Spoils explores the image archive as a living and fluid system, shaped by collecting, family stories, and the shifting meanings of images. Drawing from his own family history, rooted in both Curaçao and the Netherlands, Doran brings together personal and found photographs with materials such as canvas and stone. Through repetition, montage, and interruption, associative constellations emerge in which images are continuously recontextualized. Moving along the boundary between fiction and reality, the work allows imagination to fill the gaps left by incomplete archives and fragmented histories. In this way, the project explores what is found, lost, forgotten, and passed on, while questioning how histories and identities are preserved, constructed, imagined, and inherited.