Titia Ex

Living City: The Art of Light & Darkness

Titia Ex works with light and darkness as artistic materials. Through site-specific light installations, spatial interventions and light-sensitive walks, she explores how changes in light, darkness, time and movement can transform our perception of a place. Her work invites us to notice what is usually overlooked: what emerges, what disappears, what draws our attention and what remains just beyond the reach of the eye.

For Ex, light and darkness are not opposites but interdependent forces. Darkness is not simply the absence of light; it creates a space in which other forms of perception, imagination and life can emerge.

Her installations respond to the specific qualities of a location. Rather than imposing an autonomous image or object, Ex works with what is already present: the rhythm of day and night, seasonal changes, weather, architecture, history, human activity and ecological processes. Subtle interventions can shift the atmosphere of a place and reveal relationships that are otherwise difficult to perceive. In this sense, her work is both site-specific and time-based, unfolding differently according to where and when it is experienced.

Observation and field research are central to her practice. Ex works across disciplines, collaborating with scientists, ecologists and other specialists to investigate how light and darkness shape our experience of the living environment. These encounters feed back into her artistic work, allowing research to become part of a sensory and spatial practice rather than remaining separate from it.

One expression of this approach is Ex’s light-sensitive walks: guided encounters in which participants experience the city through changing conditions of light, darkness, time and environment. The city becomes not merely a backdrop, but a living field of relationships — one that can be read through the senses and experienced differently with each encounter.

Her artistic practice also extends into the public and political domain. As Amsterdam’s independent City Light Master, Ex brings the perspective of an artist into discussions about the quality and role of light and darkness in the urban environment. From this position, she connects artistic practice, research and public policy, questioning how cities can accommodate not only illumination, but also justice and darkness as an essential condition for human, ecological and other forms of life.

Through her work, Titia Ex proposes a different way of seeing the city: not as a fixed environment to be illuminated, but as a living, changing space in which light, darkness, time and life are continuously intertwined.

Worldwide exposure & representation in collections
Her works, objects and installations have been exhibited worldwide, such as in London, Berlin, Paris, Los Angeles, New York, Tokyo, Beijing, Gwangju, Manama, Jerusalem, Istanbul and represented in collections of institutions like the University Medical Center Leiden; Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam; Nederlands Architectuur Instituut: Glass Museum Graz Austria; Donnell Library New York; Philips Museum Eindhoven; Bureau Spoorbouwmeester Station Den Bosch; Museum Op Solder Amsterdam, Ministry of Foreign Affairs and various private collections.