My present is more than I remember
(2025)
author(s): Clara Sharell
published in: Research Catalogue
"My present is more than I remember" explores the entanglements of word and image and their role in constructing memory and identity. Drawing on my four-year practice at the KABK, it analyses the methods I’ve developed and examines the interrelation between memory, photography, and writing. Delving into personal memories and intergenerational connections within my family, I seek to understand how inherited experiences and stories shape my personal and artistic identity, guided by the act of weaving as a concept and a material.
Furthermore, the paper examines the existential role of collective and familial memory in shaping Jewish and German-Jewish identity. Using a range of texts and styles, including sociological and art-historical theories, experimental diary entries, poems, and personal anecdotes, I explore the parallels between the construction of memory and the construction of photographs. Just as photography can never represent the essence of a person, memory will never be able to represent the full truth of the past.
Vessels of Home: A Search for Belonging
(2025)
author(s): Naomi Arabel Moonlion
published in: Royal Academy of Art, The Hague
Thesis of the Royal Academy of Art, The Hague, 2023 - BA Photography
'Vessels of Home' is a 'Search for Belonging.' As more and more people feel disconnected from the world around them, finding belonging is no longer only a question of physical place, but of creating moments in an imaginative space. These moments of belonging are short-lived, they are hard to grasp and contain in our ever individualizing world. Yet, I believe they can be found and nurtured through conscious acts and rituals.
Rowan Moonlion proposes various ways to cultivate moments of belonging, through stories contained in the vessels of Fire, Earth, Water and Air (Le Guin 2020). Firstly, in Fire, regarding human interactions: rejecting patriarchal and capitalist notions of group thinking, by letting go of identity definitions based on difference. Secondly, in Earth, considering nature: returning to our connection to the land, to understand the unifying power of interbeing. Thirdly, in Water, looking within our bodies: searching for sensorial experiences of belonging by making our bodies our homes. Finally, in Air, gazing in our minds and memories, imagining new worlds, holding stories together with our ancestors.
Witchcraft and Earth honoring rituals are used as a framework to explain and exemplify the four proposed layers. 'Vessels of Home' combines academic research grounded in queer and feminist theory, conversations with witches and other lived experience stories, poetic reflections taken from Moonlion’s artistic practice, and practical tools like rituals, recipes and affirmations. Together the four layers of belonging and the four types of writing form a unifying whole. Moonlion urges you to connect to your own personal form of belonging, and hopes you will learn to understand the value of trying to live in harmony with all else on this Earth.
The elements return again and again in a cyclical manner. The circle of life is ever present.
The Group Who Loved to Draw a Flag
(2024)
author(s): Riki Stollar
published in: Royal Academy of Art, The Hague
Thesis / Research Document of the Royal Academy of Art, The Hague, 2023.
Master Artistic Research (MAR).
Designed by Faina Faigin
Reflecting on personal experiences of being part of some groups and excluded from others makes me wonder how we connect when we are already clinging. Communities can be either chosen or forced, or both, which raises questions about how these bonds are formed and when we no longer belong.
Thesis / Research Document of the Royal Academy of Art, The Hague, 2023. Master Artistic Research (MAR). Designed by Faina Faigin Reflecting on personal experiences of being part of some groups and excluded from others makes me wonder how we connect when we are already clinging. Communities can be either chosen or forced, or both, which raises questions about how these bonds are formed and when we no longer belong.open exposition comments (0)