NEXT TO ≠ REAL is a contemporary photography exhibition exploring how images shape reality, and how people continue to hold themselves together within it.

Rather than focusing on a simple divide between truth and falsehood, the exhibition looks at the unstable space where images, memory, archives, technology, and performance come close to the real, yet never fully become the same thing. It asks what comes to be seen as real, what gains credibility, and how reality is constantly organised through visual culture and lived experience.

Bringing together photography-led practices alongside installation, archival materials, and moving image, the exhibition features 14 artists who approach this shared question in different ways. Through unstable perception, fragile evidence, rewritten histories, performed selves, and acts of protection and endurance, NEXT TO ≠ REAL invites viewers to reflect on how images do not simply represent reality, but actively shape how we see, remember, and live within it.