Artists depict their traumas at exhibition by UvA students
How do you capture trauma - often underlying, unprocessed, or passed down (silently) from earlier generations - in images? That question is central to the probing exhibition “Encountering Absences” by five UvA students. “It raises the question: what is our responsibility towards migrants?”
Fourteen artists were asked by the students to show their interpretations in various forms of expression, from film and photo installations to VR and visual poetry. The opening took place this week at the Arti et Amicitiae artists’ society on the Rokin for over 100 visitors.
Why was this topic chosen? “The theme of the traumatic past is alive and well among many Dutch and international students. For example, in the form of the colonial past,” said Ihab Saloul, founder and research director of the Amsterdam School of Heritage, Memory and Material Culture.
Saloul is one of the supervisors of the students in this research project who are studying Museum Studies or Heritage and Memory Studies. According to him, this exhibition offers visitors a chance to “get to know different international works of art that hark back to traumatic experiences, such as with representations from South America, Africa, and Asia.”
Everyday world
The exhibition is intentionally NOT housed in a museum. “The idea was to give an accurate representation of underlying trauma in an everyday setting, outside the usual channels,” Saloul explains. That's why the artworks now hang on the walls of the grand-café of the Arti et Amicitiae artists’ society, which is cozily decorated with a fireplace and a counter.
That search for the everyday world is also reflected in the 24-minute film that was shown to the public during Monday’s opening. The protagonist, a migrant, is positioned in everyday life including in front of the gates of an NS train station, at the terminal for the ferry to Amsterdam-Noord, and on a footpath in the greenery. Sometimes we see this ordinary outside world through his own eyes, other times we meet his gaze, behind which lies an extraordinary inner world full of trauma.
“It raises the question: what is our responsibility to migrants?” said Saloul. “And it challenges us to reflect on who these people are.” The film is profound but at the same time serene, with people whose silhouettes slowly fade, followed by calm piano playing as the migrant’s eyes stare sternly at the viewer.
World War II
But the exhibition's location on the Rokin also proved relevant to the students for another reason. The past of the artists' society is not free of controversy. “That gives a deeper layer to the exhibition,” says Lilly-Ann de Zeeuw, master's student in Museum Studies and curator of the exhibition. This fraught history is strikingly evident in one painting hanging in the right corner in front of the bar upon entering.
For this artwork, Dalal Mitwally, an artist from Jordan, was approached to comment on an old painting in the artists’ society where the board - mostly males smoking cigars - is holding a discussion around a wooden table. Two years later, they will have decided, at the time of World War II, to exclude the Jewish population from all their activities. For Mitwally, this was reason to connect these two moments and place them in a broader perspective.
Fragments
Her artwork illustrates how administrators can decide on life and death with the stroke of a pen. “How can you determine people's future and lives based on a decision, a signature? That is the creator's criticism,” Saloul said. It is reflected in the naming of the work: “Dead paper,” which the creator says is also a reference to the empty promise made by the British during the Arab Revolt: that the Arabs would gain sovereignty over countries in the Middle East, including present-day Jordan. “This promise was never meant to be fulfilled.”
“Dead Paper” is a personal favorite of De Zeeuw’s, she reveals. But another work of art consisting of a piece of fabric hanging on the wall also attracts her strong interest: “Woven thread and metal wires” by Lebanese artist Karma Hamed. The woven threads symbolize the debris after the explosion at Beirut's port in 2020. “It is interesting to see how Hamed’s artworks tell a story, interacting with the viewer. This breaks the silence around trauma in a spatial way.”
The exhibition “Encountering Absence: Questioning Traumatic Heritages and Memories” runs from May 8-25 and is open to all.
