HIDDEN EXPLORERS EXHIBITION
HIDDEN EXPLORERS is a contemporary photographic and print-based installation reflecting on survival, hidden histories, and environmental memory through the legacy of Sir Ernest Shackleton’s Antarctic expedition 1916.
The exhibition began with the discovery of a photograph hidden behind a curtain in a London flat — Frank Hurley’s image of Mount Frank Houlder on Elephant Island, dedicated in pencil by Shackleton to Frank Houlder, whose support helped rescue the stranded Endurance crew in 1916.
More than a century later, artist Lukas Kroulik followed Shackleton’s route to Elephant Island, revisiting the landscape where survival, sacrifice, and human resilience unfolded under extreme conditions. Through photography, ice, archival fragments, and translucent fabric installations made from recycled plastic, the exhibition reimagines the iceberg as both physical form and metaphor: a symbol of hidden histories, unseen support systems, and the fragile relationship between humanity and the natural world.
Balancing historical reflection with contemporary environmental awareness, the works invite viewers to move through layers of memory, water, and ice — exploring what remains visible, and what lies beneath the surface.
Inspired by the intimacy and mystery of family photo albums — and by the idea that a family story can belong to our own family, our partner’s, our friends’, or to someone whose name has almost disappeared from history — Lukas Kroulik has chosen Frank Henry Houlder (1867–1936) as his “hidden explorer.” A Buenos Aires-based shipping magnate and head of the Houlder Line, Houlder never set foot on Antarctica, yet his support helped make Shackleton’s Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition possible. Shackleton named a feature on Elephant Island Mount Frank Houlder in his honour.
The connection was more than official gratitude: a surviving Frank Hurley presentation album, inscribed by Shackleton to Houlder in 1917, thanks him personally for his “generous assistance” and recalls his offer to equip a relief ship, while a Shackleton studio portrait dedicated to Houlder in August 1914 stands as further evidence of a friendship that reached beyond the expedition itself.
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