Een duo expositie met Faria van Creij-Callender bij Kunsthal Kloof
Review by Joke de Wolf for De Groene Amsterdammer
Pateen IV [koperacetaat] - 2025
Under the six-headed sun basks a woman who casts no shadow.
It is the simple phrase that can be found carved into the wooden fence running through the exhibition space. It suggests a scene without any shade. No shadow or silhouette that follows our movements on the ground and walls around us. It portrays a world that is unbound from reality. Where we are fully disconnected from our surroundings. No shadow in between Me and Us.
This fictional place under the sixheaded sun makes us aware of how we experience our shadow as a thing that binds us to the world. But also as a testament of how we move and act separate from everything else. It shows how we are divided and simultaneously connected. Like the fence giving a sense or separation while being as open as a window. Like the mirrors that reflect the things that are out of frame. Like the white walls that allow the viewer to freely imagine the connection between two artworks. Like the river flowing between two sides. Even the shadows in themselves can be seen as a place of in-betweenness.
In the exhibition ‘Tussen twee Oevers’, artists Geertje Brandenburg (Rotterdam, 1998) and Faria van Creij-Callender (Amsterdam, 1998) explore these thresholds: the spaces that hover between me and you, between dream and memory, between the self and the other. These sites of in-betweenness become metaphors for the fluidity with which we experience identity. And precisely here is where we find dialogue. The stories do not only reside within individual pieces, they unfold in the distance between them and invite viewers to bring their own associations.
Both artists explore how they are bound to the world around them: to strangers and ancestors, to the space between memory and myth. As new connections are made and as the sun moves our shadow through the day, we too are always in-between. This ebb and flow reminds us that identity is experienced both within ourselves and through recognising the other.
- Text by Stein van der Ziel, curator at Kunsthal Kloof