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Research statement

Leonardiansyah Allenda

With his writing, Allenda examines how this Dutch and Western ideology failed in practice, causing ethnic segregation and creating a new form of oppression after Indonesian independence. He is interested in how these political ideologies transformed and traveled together with the emergence of the Amsterdam School: the aesthetic carried some influences from Indonesian tradition to the Netherlands with Eduard Cuypers and traveled back to Indonesia with Liem Bwan Tjie after his studies at Delft University and work for Michel de Klerk.

Chapter 6: Marni (2020) is an installation consisting of a soundscape, video, hanging sculptures, tables, and textiles, enclosed by golden walls. In this work, Allenda employs the fictional body of Marni to transform layers of narrations into spatial experience. The narrative itself complicates social history, architecture, and belief systems. The atmosphere and elements of the installation are a reflection of Marni's subconscious realm, and her perceptual conflict of having grown up in a belief system with deep, spiritual roots in nature and now spending her daily life inside a constructed Amsterdam School-style interior, one that gestures superficially to that mysticism and confronts her with elements – like wood – that have been ripped from their natural contexts.  

INSPIRATION

Melisha Dewalt 

People of Color in European Art History

Everyone is biased. Objectivity is a cultural fallacy.

https://medievalpoc.tumblr.com

Arjen Mulder

Ephemeral art is made in memory of someone whose mortality the artist wishes not to outdo but to honor in the transitoriness of the work. The piece sacrifices its stability for the sake of a living memory of someone who is lost forever. From then on, that person’s life takes place in us, the viewers, or rather the participants in the work of art and the memory. Remembering is something you do with your body, like loving. Ephemeral art does not entrust it to external forms of memory, such as photographs, representations and memorabilia. Only the flesh is mortal. Only in our bodies are we able to share each other’s powerlessness. Might be interesting for my own research; dissecting as a performative act. 

Wieteke van Zeil 'Hoe zwarte modellen in de Nederlandse kunst verschijnen'

Soms is iets onzichtbaar, ook als het recht voor je neus staat. De kunst is ervan vergeven. Een zwarte bediende in een familieportret. Een slavin naast een koopman. Een bediende van een witte courtisane. Natuurlijk zijn ze er wel. Maar ook weer niet; als je de beschrijvingen van kunstwerken in sommige musea en boeken leest, zou je soms denken dat ze niet bestonden. Als alle personen worden geduid en beschreven wordt op een schilderij behalve die ene donkere persoon, dan wordt die ene langzaam onzichtbaar. Wel afgebeeld, niet opgemerkt.

Het staketsel van de Westerse kunstgeschiedenis dat sinds de 19de eeuw is gebouwd, bibliotheken en musea vol, heeft sommige mensen eruit gefilterd. Dat ging heel subtiel, door aandachtsberoving. Maar het tij is aan het keren. Er ontstaan nieuwe perspectieven op oude meesters, waardoor onder andere de aanwezigheid van de zwarte mens in de Westerse schilderijen in het licht komt.

 

Musée D’Orsay maakt nu met de tentoonstelling Le Modèle Noir een spectaculaire inhaalslag met de geschiedenis, door de zwarte modellen op Franse schilderijen alle aandacht te geven. Met secuur archiefonderzoek werd zoveel mogelijk achterhaald over hun identiteit én wordt nauwkeuriger gekeken naar hun betekenis in de voorstelling. ‘Model’ heeft hier een dubbele betekenis: als de figuren die zijn afgebeeld, en als voorbeeld. Nu sommigen een naam hebben gekregen, zijn zij ook rolmodel voor de vrije zwarte burgers in de Franse samenleving net na de afschaffing van de slavernij.

Zoals Madeleine. Bij de entree van de tentoonstelling hangt ze pal tegenover de twee originele verklaringen van de afschaffing van de slavernij. Twee, omdat eerst in 1794 de slavernij werd afgeschaft in Frankrijk, toen Napoleon de boel kwam terugdraaien in 1815, waarna er in 1848 pas definitief een einde aan de slavernij kwam. Madeleine werd geschilderd als vrije Franse burger in 1800. Hier in de tentoonstelling is Madeleine een icoon, en terecht. Het is een historisch monument; de uit Guadeloupe afkomstige vrouw kijkt ons recht aan, in een lege, lichte ruimte. Ze draagt kleding in drie kleuren, het rood, wit en blauw van de Franse vlag; een symbolisch beeld van vrijheid. Ze is half gekleed, wat wij nu als exotiserend zouden kunnen beschouwen - waarom tieten in een waardig portret? – en toch is ze er, kijkt ze ons recht aan vanuit het verleden, en heeft ze een naam. De vrouw die haar schilderde, de adellijke Marie Guillemine Benoist, was haar werkgeefster. Beide kregen niet veel aandacht in de geschiedenis. En nu is er grond voor erkenning.

I started this semester with the idea of dissecting places. During my last assessment I deconstructed a model, dissecting a fictional world into the scenographic elements of material, sound, light, time  and narrative. At the beginning of the second semester I had the idea of collecting material that represented the different scenographic elements to eventually combine, curate and create a collection of fictional worlds. With this as a starting point the first collection consisted of slides - I divided the slides again into different scenographic elements: place, light, sound, time and presence. Contrary to what I expected, the collection of slides raised new and other questions which changed my perspective from which I gathered material. Unconsiously the slides became the first collection of places I've never been. 

HOW

did I start?

Ernst van Alphen 

No longer a monument for future memory / The use of documentary materials actually manipulates reality / Because the photos are old and presented as part of an archive, they automatically belong to the past, to a lost world / The realm of ‘lost worlds’

 

 

Pieter Paul Pothoven

By cutting up these remnants of Dutch colonial history and building something new, Pieter Paul Pothoven has created a political framework that repurposes historical artifacts to commemorate and represent a different narrative on the past: one of anti-imperialist resistance.

Anna Fafafliou 

We are our memories. We are a collection or a selection of our memories. 

Barby Asante

An archive filled with material that is kind of gathered pertaining to a person, to a place,  to an event or a kind of movement.

Quinsy Gario & Mina Ouaouirst

The obscureness of Saint Maurice’s journey and Dutch-Latvian colonial relations through the Amsterdam shipyards reflect complex histories from which one could learn how to attempt to repair colonial damage. By highlighting such overlooked past relations, the work stimulates viewers to critically contemplate transcultural memory as a means to repair gaps in history writing.

Bob & Roberta Smith

Archive is where memories are stored and history is made. Archives are about democracy. They are repositories of knowledge. They are spaces where we save items which relate to how things were done in the past, how things were done badly or how things were done really well. 

The gathered slides, analogue photographs and letters are nostalgic material that all came from different sources, embodying a memory. Instead of collecting scenographic elements, the collected personal sources transformed into scenographic experiments: letters led to building models, prints made me map the movement of light and photos became paper flowers. 


Through the expansion of a, now, very personal collection, I noticed a connection between the memories. I realised that they are all memories that are not mine. They are memories of places I've never been, conversations I've never had and people I’ve never met. 

 

I want to reconstruct the collected memories - by manipulating the sources through editing and abstracting the photos, letters and stories. Exploring the known and unknown. 

WHAT

do I want?

Kader Attia

The experience with these different cultures, the histories of which over centuries have been characterised by rich trading traditions, colonialism and multi-ethnic societies, has fostered Kader Attia’s intercultural and interdisciplinary approach of research. For many years, he has been exploring the perspective that societies have on their history, especially as regards experiences of deprivation and suppression, violence and loss, and how this affects the evolving of nations and individuals — each of them being connected to collective memory.

 

Kara Walker 

known for her candid investigation of race, gender, sexuality, and violence through silhouetted figures

Per Bak Jensen

Art is not only about creating something new, but reminds us of things we've forgotten. With the goal to capture the hidden things. There is a story of a rock that traveled from Norway to the coast of Germany - adjust my speed to the movement of the rock. 

I am interested in the ownership of memories - if you are not remembered, do you exist? 


While collecting I kept circling back to this question. The question arose from my own experience of not being remembered by someone. I collect memories that are not mine since the original owner of the memory is not able to recall them. 

 

The Research Catalogue represents the personal archive that has grown in recent weeks. An archive where the past is present, where I look for letters and photos to then ask myself whose letters and photos I didn't find? Is a space only filled by those who left something behind?

WHERE

does it come from?

Carl Beam

Beam works in a variety of media to explore the tensions between Western and Aboriginal relations. Through his work Beam integrates personal memory with issues related to the environment, brutality, and a rethinking of the ways histories are told.

Martha Langford

She challenges the conventional emphasis on the camera as a tool of perception by arguing that photographic works are products of the mind - picturing memory is, first and foremost, the expression of a mental process. The discussion of the tensions between remembering and forgetting, the intersection of memory and imagination, and the relationship between memory and history.

Jin-me Yoon

Addresses the social and historical narratives, constructions and representations that surround questions of identity. Drawing on the necessary but problematic labels she bears and is yet not bound to. Works such as Souvenirs of the Self and Unbidden deal with interrelated questions of identity, memory, place and displacement.

Stan Denniston

His works employ the photographic image as a component, either to be paired with another image or accompanied by text. His work revolves around the themes of travel, memory and representation. For a decade, beginning in the late 1980’s, he explored the idea of photography as very unstable evidence to the extent even of being fiction.

Dominique Luster

History is not  just everything now backwards, that is something we call the past and history is also not just a catalogue of events put into the right order. History is a series of strategically curated decisions. Decisions that have the ability to either uplift some or silence others. Those choices and those decisions are made by people who are able to create entire silenced landscapes. People groups entirely included or excluded from history making. 

 

We trust the evidence we find in the archive. We see letters or photographs in archives that are the closest thing to actually being there, but we tend to overlook the bias decision-making practices of the history gatekeeper about what you found in that archive and what you didn’t. So we look at these letters and photographs and we think about well whose letters did I find but whose letters will I never find? What was the position or the person or the perspective of the individual letters that I found and whose perspective and positions will I never find? I feel like it’s quite unfathomable to understand that the 99.9% of first-person experience that will never be remembered, that has been purposefully oppressed suppressed or buried from history. The inclusion or exclusion of documents or things from history making is an assertion of power.

Akram Zaatari 

Searching for alternative historical and cultural narratives, Zaatari reveals the contents of the Arab Image Foundation through documentary film, photography and art, bringing new readings to the collection. 

 

Blurring the lines between photography, film, archiving, curating, theory and art, Zaatari began working with the archive, collecting photographs, researching photographers, compiling series of photographs, responding to images, exploring photographers through film, and abstractly using the photographs as objects in themselves. This artistic experimentation consequently revealed alternative histories to those captured, such as that of image-making and photography as practice or how identity and self-representation have developed. His work challenges what we might read from a photograph.