Forbidden Territories. 100 Years of Surreal Landscapes

Imagine spaces where surreal landscapes merge with vibrant colors and floating fields of clouds. In the autumn of 2025, Museum Arnhem presented Forbidden Territories. 100 Years of Surreal Landscapes. Exactly one hundred years after André Breton published the Surrealist Manifesto, the exhibition offered a renewed perspective on Surrealism. Well known and lesser known artists from the first half of the twentieth century were presented alongside contemporary artists, each using the landscape as a way to express inner worlds, social issues, and the relationship between humans and nature.
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Spatial design
Studio met met
Graphic design
Dana Dijkgraaf
Production Exhibition
Museum Arnhem and Studio met met
Curating, organization, text, concept development
Museum Arnhem
Print design
Dana Dijkgraaf and Studio met met

Concept
Rather than presenting landscapes as representations of reality, the exhibition explored them as reflections of dreams, memories, desires, and political or personal beliefs. The landscape became a place where the unconscious takes shape and imagination is free to transform reality. Divided into several thematic chapters, the exhibition ranged from hopeful and poetic worlds to darker, politically charged landscapes. Each section was given its own atmosphere, reinforcing the curator’s narrative and the emotional impact of the artworks.

What did we create?
Together with Studio Met Met we developed an immersive exhibition design that invited visitors to step inside the landscapes themselves. Organic text panels inspired by automatic drawing were combined with custom designed display elements, a carefully curated color palette, and expansive cloudscapes that visually connected the different spaces.

The museum floor became the ground beneath the visitors’ feet, the artworks revealed imagined landscapes, and the skies created a shared horizon throughout the exhibition. Several cloud installations were gently animated by hidden fans, creating subtle movement that gave the space a dreamlike, almost breathing quality.

Each thematic section was paired with its own color palette and a different sky, ranging from sunrise to sunset, creating a distinct emotional atmosphere. The cloudscapes themselves were generated with the help of artificial intelligence. Just as Surrealist artists used the unconscious to distort and reimagine reality, AI draws from a vast collective digital memory to construct new visual worlds. The result was a contemporary interpretation of Surrealist thinking, where nature, imagination, and technology seamlessly merge.

Sparkles
The AI generated skies became more than a visual backdrop. They formed a conceptual bridge between a century of Surrealism and today’s technological landscape. By using artificial intelligence as a contemporary creative tool, each sky could express the emotional character of its theme, inviting visitors to momentarily leave reality behind and wander through a world shaped by dreams and imagination.

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