In the Netherlands there is this summer classic on the Telly in which someone with a “special” background is asked to put together their favorite viewing night. During a durational live conversation, they are then asked to explain the clips of their choice. Last Sunday this show was centered around Liesbeth Zegveld. She specialized in liability for human rights violations and is particularly committed to war victims. Liesbeth had chosen excerpts as biographical hooks on which to hang her life story. There are the legal issues she has been working on. To her, the most important function of justice is to offer a story. A story in which victims recognize themselves and on which society can construct solidarity. Like, the Excesses of Rawagedeh, when she called the Dutch state to account. By getting the facts out and letting victims speak, the narrative changed. Even if the actual events took place more than 60 years ago.
In 2011, Nabuurs&VanDoorn were there to portray the group around Jeffry Pondaag. He is founder and chairman of the Committee of Dutch Honorary Debts. Jeffry stands up for Indonesian victims of the Dutch colonial occupation system. It was there when Liesbeth won the case against the Dutch state (which he initiated) on behalf of the widows of Rawagedeh, relatives of victims of a mass execution during “police actions” in the Dutch East Indies in 1947. During the tv-show Liesbeth mentions that when the two of them first met, the stories Jeffry told her, made her re-visit the history books that educated her. It was shocking to her that nothing was to be found on these facts. Together they then rewrote history as we know it. Nabuurs&VanDoorn did not only witness it all but also produced a large-scale multimedia installation based on their experiences. In 2014, they exhibited the works at the contemporary art center in Gdansk, Poland during their solo-exhibition The Sea Awaits Your Return.
The artists literally wanted to give face to their unlearning experiences and portrayed eight archetypical patriarchal characters. The development of these characters they based on objects presented in vanitas images. During the Golden Age when Dutch colonialism reached its peak, so did Dutch Memento Mori paintings. Looking at the art in fashion then, they wanted to re-form this style and make it contemporary. This way they wanted to deconstruct state-controlled history to open it up and give space to other voices. Nabuurs&VanDoorn began to study classical vanitas paintings and categorize objects depicted in categories relating to the case against the Dutch state on behalf of the widows of Rawagedeh. They then started to scour marketplaces in search of these objects in the fashion of the whole situation in which they found themselves and build a collection from which they could experiment with vanitas settings in their studio.
Bringing together the vanitas settings Nabuurs&VanDoorn experienced visions of extravaganza and Disneyesque characters. The artist referred to these metaphysical events as seances with ghosts of bygone eras. Nabuurs then re-enacted these ghost appearances while reading aloud song lyrics from punk-rock music classics dating back to the time of their own education. Nabuurs challenges cultural limitations by creating and embodying multiple alter egos of different male, white, positions. In transforming herself into one character after another, she performed the proposition that gender, class, and racial identity are fluid. If such categories are unstable, the works suggest, then so too must be the social hierarchies that are built upon them.
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