Critical testimonials about the Indian past

Black and white photos from the former Dutch East Indies, tens of thousands of them were taken. They show a colonial past of the Dutchman in the Indies world. For artist Nynke Deinema, those photos have something guilty about them. So she perforates it, she draws red scratches over it. She calls her working method ‘iconoclasm’, iconoclasm. Together with Clementine Oomes, Deinema has the exhibition in the Amsterdam gallery What Art Can Do Totok – Indian Sense. ‘Totok’, that is a white European in the Indies period, nowadays a word with a negative connotation.

Deinema and Oomes share a background in the Dutch East Indies. Deinema’s grandfather had the cultural enterprise Siloewok Sawangan on Java with coffee, rubber, kapok and cocoa. One of Deinema’s (1963) intensively edited family photos shows five workers, called coolies at the time. They stand barefoot and lift three stuffed bales onto a scale or lorry. The black and white seems like a negative, an image from a distant past. Strings of hard pink beads run over the work of art and Deinema made red scratches over it, as a symbol it seems to erase the colonial imagery. The series is called #Siloewok Sawangan and shows, among other things, a cocoa nut and tobacco leaves hanging to dry. Due to the careful and rigorous processing, the photos have the power of contemporary, critical testimonials about the Indies past.

Disconcerting image

Clementine Oomes (1970) considers herself a second-generation victim. Her mother, grandmother and aunt spent three and a half years in a Japanese internment camp. That gruesome reality characterizes her past, and her work. Closed face and Closed mouth, of mixed media, show two portraits, one of herself as a five-year-old girl and one of a boy, whose face and mouth are hidden behind thin wire, like iron wire. Silence and captivity expressed in a disconcerting image. The series is of a tranquil and at the same time raw beauty Mama Saya, small, pure white viewing boxes containing three beds with a pillow on top. It takes some time before you find out, I first had to think of a poem by Gerrit Kouwenaar, Total white room. Then you discover: the object must represent the hut in the camp. Inside, Oomes places drawings in rough hard sketch lines by way of dramatic contrast.

Like Deinema, she manipulates reality. Work The map is painted on the back of a painting, which is stapled to a panel. The map in the title refers to the map of the Japanese camp. We see nothing more than a few lines, as if they want to show us the way.

Oomes is more explicit in processing her family’s Indisch past than Deinema. With titles like Lost religion, Warzone and War green she emphatically refers to the violent past in the former East Indies. In War zone (mixed media on canvas) we see fleeing figures against a chaotic background, everything drawn as if in a nightmare. This moving double exhibition shows, however different Deinema and Oomes work, that the ‘Indisch awareness’ is one of traumas from apparently long ago, but that is not the case. They are now, and still are, represented in more subdued (Deinema) or emphatically dramatic (Oomes) works of art.

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