Lukas van Bentum

UNCLASSIFIED explores how images produce, communicate and legitimise power. Bringing together publicly released military imagery and archival material the project looks at how photographs become documents, evidence and instruments of authority.
The images are removed from their original contexts and printed onto unstable surfaces such as mirror foil, tracing paper and translucent paper. These materials interfere with what is depicted, making the images difficult to fully grasp or read. What appears to offer access or evidence remains partly obscured.
The project examines the tension between the promise of transparency and the limits of what images can actually reveal. It questions the authority we assign to photographs and how their meaning is shaped by the conditions of their production, circulation and display.
Ultimately, UNCLASSIFIED considers the image as both a means of revealing power and a way of concealing it.

Tender Machine 002 (archival fragment), 2026
Tender Machine
2026 - ongoing

Tender Machine explores how images of violence, weaponry, and masculinity circulate, aestheticise, and feel strangely seductive. Drawing from military propaganda, gun magazines, and online imagery, the project collapses the visual distance between firearms and the male body. Through cropped details and tactile surfaces, weapons begin to function like bodies, while bodies acquire the formal qualities of weapons. This slippage exposes the erotic aesthetics through which militarised power is made desirable. Rather than documenting violence itself, the work investigates the visual languages that shape our attraction to force long before violence is physically encountered.

Tender Machine 005 (archival fragment), 2026
Tender Machine
2026 - ongoing

Tender Machine explores how images of violence, weaponry, and masculinity circulate, aestheticise, and feel strangely seductive. Drawing from military propaganda, gun magazines, and online imagery, the project collapses the visual distance between firearms and the male body. Through cropped details and tactile surfaces, weapons begin to function like bodies, while bodies acquire the formal qualities of weapons. This slippage exposes the erotic aesthetics through which militarised power is made desirable. Rather than documenting violence itself, the work investigates the visual languages that shape our attraction to force long before violence is physically encountered.

UNCLASSIFIED 001 (inkjet print on tracing paper), 2026
UNCLASSIFIED
2026 - ongoing

UNCLASSIFIED explores how images produce, communicate and legitimise power. Bringing together publicly released military imagery and archival material the project looks at how photographs become documents, evidence and instruments of authority.
The images are removed from their original contexts and printed onto unstable surfaces such as mirror foil, tracing paper and translucent paper. These materials interfere with what is depicted, making the images difficult to fully grasp or read. What appears to offer access or evidence remains partly obscured.
The project examines the tension between the promise of transparency and the limits of what images can actually reveal. It questions the authority we assign to photographs and how their meaning is shaped by the conditions of their production, circulation and display.
Ultimately, UNCLASSIFIED considers the image as both a means of revealing power and a way of concealing it.

The Big Bang (single-channel video), 2026
Tender Machine
2026 - ongoing

Tender Machine explores how images of violence, weaponry, and masculinity circulate, aestheticise, and feel strangely seductive. Drawing from military propaganda, weapons magazines, and online imagery, the project examines how systems of power are not only represented but also desired and consumed. Rather than documenting violence itself, it investigates the visual languages that make militarisation appear aspirational and intimate, asking how images shape our relationship to force long before violence is physically encountered.

Untitled (text fragment), written by Jarred Picket, Rapid City, 2024
Erosion
2025

[more..]

Erosion
self-published by Lukas van Bentum
2025

[more..]

UNCLASSIFIED 003 (inkjet print on tracing paper), 2026
UNCLASSIFIED
2026 - ongoing

UNCLASSIFIED explores how images produce, communicate and legitimise power. Bringing together publicly released military imagery and archival material the project looks at how photographs become documents, evidence and instruments of authority.
The images are removed from their original contexts and printed onto unstable surfaces such as mirror foil, tracing paper and translucent paper. These materials interfere with what is depicted, making the images difficult to fully grasp or read. What appears to offer access or evidence remains partly obscured.
The project examines the tension between the promise of transparency and the limits of what images can actually reveal. It questions the authority we assign to photographs and how their meaning is shaped by the conditions of their production, circulation and display.
Ultimately, UNCLASSIFIED considers the image as both a means of revealing power and a way of concealing it.

Graduationshow, KASK Ghent, 2022
Spectacle
group exhibition

[more..]

Tender Machine 005 (archival fragment), 2026
Tender Machine
2026 - ongoing

Tender Machine explores how images of violence, weaponry, and masculinity circulate, aestheticise, and feel strangely seductive. Drawing from military propaganda, gun magazines, and online imagery, the project collapses the visual distance between firearms and the male body. Through cropped details and tactile surfaces, weapons begin to function like bodies, while bodies acquire the formal qualities of weapons. This slippage exposes the erotic aesthetics through which militarised power is made desirable. Rather than documenting violence itself, the work investigates the visual languages that shape our attraction to force long before violence is physically encountered.

(Un)broken, Zwarte Zaal, KASK Ghent, 2022
Spectacle
group exhibition

[more..]

Mimosa Savage (aluminium offset printing plate), Omaha, Nebraska, 2025
Erosion
2024

The March (3D printed archival scan), 2023
The March
2023

Big eyes (extract, single-channel video), WIJK8, 2021
Big eyes
group exhibition with Luna Ireland

Big Eyes appropriates publicly accessible webcam streams from public spaces across Belgium to explore contemporary regimes of surveillance, visibility, and public control. By shifting these images into an exhibition context, the work transforms compression artefacts, transmission errors, and pixelated glitches into interruptions of the camera's claim to transparency. Rather than presenting surveillance as an all-seeing system, Big Eyes reveals visibility as mediated, unstable, and inseparable from censorship.

guteaussichten - new German photography, Deichtorhallen Hamburg, 2020
Identity Negotiation
group exhibition

[more..]

Information