Reversed Silhouettes of European History – 2018
Reversed Silhouettes of European History – 2018
In the work ‘Reversed Silhouettes of European History’ I have investigated how formal and informal, conscious and unconscious education has informed my own Eurocentric understanding of the world.
Oscilating between my own German childhood where ‘ethnic masquerades’ as an ‘Indian’ were quite common and my experiences with the Dutch way of Eurocentric history-lessons where nautic heroism and nationalism were long enough common sense I use the method of collage to combine words with images from those private and other, more institutional archives (quotes from newspapers or articles, pictures from family pictures, Museum Bronbeek, Rijksmuseum)
In that proces I have reversed the system of the silhouette: that which is actually depicted are holes.
Title: Reversed Silhouettes of European History
Date: 2018
Seizes: 70 x 50 cm
Material:
How to overcome the world vision based on the division of the West and the Rest?
What is needed to unlearn my own biases?
What can I do to de-colonize history lessons?
How to teach history from a global perspective?
Exposition
In 2017 curator Youri Appelo invited me for the inspiring exposition In the Pursuit of: Alternative Truths at the artists space, Pact, formerly known as Expoplu. My works got very good company from works made my Lado Darakhvelidze, Domenique Himmelsbach de Vries, Lyubov Matyunina, Rune Peitersen, Belit Sağ.
That exhibition had combined works of art as a visual analyses of the way we gain knowledge that all shapes our perception on truth and reality.
Article of Fenne Saedt: Alternative truths Karl Marx in een bad vol blauwe glitters.
Related Work
The Illuminating Shadows Of Texas – 2015
Marfa – Texas. How to define this place: a crime scene of history, a monument or a ruin?
Songs of Colonial Labour – 2021
Investigation about unconscious values of labour in children- en folksongs, especially focusing on the old Dutch folksong ‘Daar was eens een meisje loos’.