It's getting hot in here

A solo exhibition of the most recent work

I am one of the people who grew up between two cultures, the Dutch and the Sami culture. As so many second-generation immigrants, the knowledge I have of the origins and cultural backgrounds of my family is a combination of vague memories, tales told by my mother, brief visits, photos and films.

Inspiration

My bond with this environment is my mother who came to the Netherlands in her migration to the South. I grew up with my Sami mother and learned Dutch from Sesame Street together with her. Now that my mother has passed away, I feel inspired to portray the special life of my family.

My reliance on second-hand experiences makes the (re)construction of my own identity ambiguous and incomplete. The concept of my “own” culture is sometimes no less of a cliché than the mental and media images that are in everyday circulation.

Conscious or unconscious gaps in memory demand to be bridged, and the result is an unending clash between the person who experienced the life of the past and the person now narrating and reflecting it in the present. Memories are recorded and stored in photo albums – like an autobiography, which is by nature an amateur activity, doomed from the beginning to be a second-rate. For in arranging photos in an album, we are guided by the unconscious desire to polish life, often the result is the reduction of life to a facade.

Most recent work

In my recent work I show the wild Sami landscape with main characters splashing out of it. The environment is unchanged, but the handling of it has been renewed. The subjects in my work are accentuated by the use of motifs and patterns found on fabrics from around the world.

Organisator en curator van deze expositie: Ghita van Bergen