You Don’t Look Sick

What does it mean to inhabit a body that defies expectations? To be seen, yet remain unseen, and to exist in a space suspended between external narratives and lived experiences?

You Don't Look Sick investigates the artist’s experience of navigating an unseen disability. The work examines the tension between self-perception and the societal lens, asking what happens when the body - often seen as a reflection of identity - becomes a canvas for projection instead. 

Through the creation of a sculpture of herself, a video reproduction of a recurring conversation, and a series of self-portrait collages that developed alongside the sculpture, Jasmijn Vermeeren reflects on the dialogue between gazes—her own, the able-bodied gaze, and the gaze of the camera – exploring her own skin as the threshold where these gazes meet and collide.