Guest curator and visual artist Sara Blokland (1969, Netherlands) is an independent researcher into photography. Rather than focusing on the content of museum collections, her work zooms in on that which is excluded. Through photographs, museum props and letters she examines the development of colonial narratives in a museum context.
Through her research and visual art, Blokland reflects on the complex role played by photography in mediating colonial and post-colonial histories. In the IDENTITIES exhibition Blokland will be showing two new works. These meditate on the role of the museum as producer of ‘culture’ and zoom in on the representation of colonial and post-colonial histories.
Blokland studied at Amsterdam’s Rietveld Academy (BA in photography) and the Sandberg Institute (MFA) before going on to gain an MA in film and photographic studies at Leiden University. Her work has been shown in Seoul’s Kumho Museum of Art, Gallery Lmak-projects in New York, Amsterdam’s Stedelijk Museum for modern art and the Arnhem Museum of Modern Art. Artworks by Blokland have been acquired by various private and public collections, such as the ABN AMRO Collection, the Rabobank Collection, the Houston Museum of Fine Arts and the Kunstmuseum in The Hague. Blokland was also photographer and editor for the book Van Waarde [‘Of Value’] (2008), and a publication about the Surinam police band (2009). In 2012 she initiated and co-edited the book Unfixed: Photography and Post-Colonial Perspectives in Contemporary Art.
The work of photographer and filmma
Reflection on Jewish-Caribbean family historyThro
Performance poet and visual artist Quinsy Gario (1984, Curaçao) focuses
