The Body Keeps the Score is bound to be a topic of conversation ★★★☆☆

palpitations. Shaking hands. Sleepless nights. A traumatic event can haunt you for years to come, not only in memories, but also in the form of physical complaints. You don’t even need to have experienced the trauma yourself: experts increasingly agree that you can inherit stress reactions from your parents. This phenomenon, intergenerational trauma, is about The Body Keeps the Score in the Kunstenlab in Deventer.

The modest group exhibition – nine artists, mostly young and living in the Netherlands – is named after the 2014 bestseller on the same theme. weeks in ‘s bestseller list The New York Times. One of the reasons for the television program Summer guests to invite the trauma expert: he will close the season on August 28.

With an exhibition about family traumas you can go in different directions. For example, it makes sense to zoom in on personal stories with a narrative medium such as video art. Guest curators Yuki Kho and Maurits de Bruijn choose a different path in the Kunstenlab: here the artworks are more tactile than narrative. In the white, open space there are mainly sculptures that emphasize materials such as crumpled aluminum, hand-stitched fabric and wavy ceramics.

In the exhibition booklet, the curators write that they have opted for works of art that ‘give shape to ghostly feelings and experiences’. That sounds vague, and that vague is the power of something The Body Keeps the Score. This is about physical sensations for which few words exist, so it’s nice to let images and materials speak for themselves. Sarah van Sonsbeeck, for example, does this very convincingly in a wall sculpture of aluminum and gold. You feel how every dent and crease in the material remains visible on the surface. Those dents make it look vulnerable and strong at the same time, something that may also apply to those who dare to face the ghosts of the past.

The accompanying texts are quite abstract. This gives a lot of room for interpretation, but also entails the risk that you feel a bit lost, for example with the work of Gerda Maas, Hidden Memories II. The artwork itself is beautiful: a weave of delicate, translucent seed pods from the Judas penny plant, covered with a layer of silver leaf. The text talks about brain scans (that’s what the shields look like) and Alzheimer’s. For this reviewer, the link with the theme was just a little too vague and more guidance would have been welcome.

Someone else will catch on to this work of art, each body speaks a different language. So a tip: don’t go alone, but with your family, friends, loved ones. This sensitive exhibition is sure to provide a topic for conversation about things that are difficult to capture in language.