Foreign Object at Galleri 54 Peepshow

From 22 May to 14 June 2026, my work, Foreign Object, will be exhibiting at Galleri 54 Peepshow.

The work is presented through the gallery's window display as a photograph that hangs behind the real version of the photo: a real tomato and metal tools that will decay over the exhibit period.

What does it mean to be a foreign object?

Thurees, the artist

I think of wooden splinters lodged in my fingers, the way my body lets me know that something that does not belong is in it, has occupied it. Something as small as a hair-thin wooden splinter suddenly becomes impossible to ignore: stinging, sometimes throbbing even, swollen, and red. It stays making itself known until it finds its way out.

This tomato, punctured with a safety pin, weighed down by objects around it, becomes my own wooden splinter.

It mirrors the essence of being a foreign object: the internal friction and subtle nuances of feeling like you don’t quite belong, and the intricacies that define that experience. Growing up in the Philippines, tomatoes were everywhere. They formed the base of so many meals, abundant and almost taken for granted. Now, living in Sweden, I find myself standing in grocery aisles examining these same fruits with the intensity of the tools in this photograph. They're expensive here, milder in flavor, but still somehow essential to recreating the flavors that connect me to home. The clinical instruments suggest the scrutiny we all perform when shopping, but also the particular examination immigrant bodies and choices often undergo. What do you eat? Why do you need this? How much are you willing to pay for something that used to grow easily where you came from?

For this exhibition, I’m placing a real tomato in front of its printed image. As the tomato decays over these three weeks, I think about that wooden splinter again. Eventually, it works its way to the surface, or the body pushes it out, or it becomes absorbed into something new. The tomato will rot, but the photograph preserves this moment of examination, this moment of being foreign. Maybe that's how we finally belong: not by staying the same, but by allowing ourselves to transform.

Photographic memory

Eskil Högman, the curator

Sometimes I forget that photographs are in fact not memories. They are not alive like memories are. Memories must be maintained to survive and photographs are by their nature frozen in time, unable to be changed. But photographs can still be a bridge in between. Especially when contrasted with the living thing itself. An old photograph turns to life when viewed in contemporary contexts, compared to our own here-and-now. The image can become a living memory, if we accept the time that has passed since the camera shutter was pressed down.