‘No Pleasure Cruise’ is a photographic body of work by Sjoerd Houben, in which he questions how the medium itself might deal with abstract concepts and the way these concepts find their way back into the image. ‘No Pleasure Cruise’ is set up according to Houben’s firm belief in happiness as a rhizomatic concept. There is no cosmic order in which a thing is in its perfect instantiation, there is not one perfect way of getting things done. There is not one state of being of a certain subject, it’s fluid, it’s subjective.

The work evolves in an associative and organic manner; connecting various subjects that at first sight don’t seem to overlap. The subjects are chosen from a range of Houben’s relations, some intimate and close, others more distant and removed. He doesn’t focus on the relationship with his subjects, but uses a sense of tension as a means of forming connections between images.