Andrea Rádai and Miloushka Bokma
Under the title ‘be-longing’, Art Gallery O-68 will show works by Miloushka Bokma (video and photos) and Andrea Rádai) (paintings) from April 7 to May 5, 2024. This exhibition is rooted in the human desire to belong somewhere, to experience a sense of connection in the midst of an ever-changing world. These artists each represent this theme in their own way. While Bokma zooms in on the refugee problem and the emotional influence on people, Radai focuses on issues such as leisure, migration, representation and identity.
The personal and emotional history that every person carries with them is the starting point in the work of Miloushka Bokma (1971). Through our memory, remembrances and and experiences are expressed in a specific way in a person’s face, glance or body posture. In her photo and video works Miloushka looks at the language of the body in relation to the environment and investigates situations of human ability and inability in relation to one’s own history. The work she shows ‘Sense of the Damaged consists of a video and photo series, inspired by photos from the news. Reality is often more absurd and bitter than you could imagine. We are inundated with images and this also makes us dull in a certain way. Our conscience has become a casual phenomenon of our time. Today it is here, tomorrow it is gone. The work expresses great emotional feelings of loss, grief and the incredible resilience of man in relation to his or her history. Miloushka currently presents ‘Premiere Sense of the Damaged’ March 23, 2024 Cinedans Festival/ Eye Amsterdam and participated in ‘Nordic Light Festival, Kristiansund Norway 2023.
In 1983, 15-year-old Antillean boy Kerwin Duinmeijer was murdered in Amsterdam by a skinhead. Since then, Duinmeijer’s death has become a symbol of racist violence in the Netherlands. His story touched Andrea Rádai (1964), especially because of his backstory. She came across holiday snapshots of the Duinmeijer family camping holidays. These very personal images are mundane, but precisely in their banality they offer a striking testimony to a struggle over identity, which in retrospect is radically complicated by Kerwin’s violent death. Rádai took these images as a starting point to investigate the power dynamics of leisure. How can holiday snapshots both reveal and obscure the power dynamics in the personal concerns that exist in every family? At the same time, it also exposes the deeper socio-economic inequalities that determine who has the time and money to travel as a leisure tourist. Holidays thrive because they enable a state of exception, but who falls under these exceptions? This series explores visual stories about freedom and relaxation. Who gets to archive and anchor their family stories through holiday snapshots and photo albums? How do migrant communities relate to these forms of leisure? As such, both form and content challenge the idea of inclusion in cultural spaces, going beyond the specific story of people like Kerwin
