Amsterdam has never known destruction. The last time the city was besieged was in 1650. During the Second World War, a few stray bombs fell. Inhabitants who still remember the German occupation are becoming scarce. And yet, an increasing number of people who can speak from experience live here: fighters, victims, veterans, those who have fled. People who know what it is like to see their home in ruins, to fight for their lives, to lose family and friends to violence, to be erased from history.
Those experiences change a city. On its surface, Amsterdam is a stable, steadily expanding, centuries-old whole comprised of streets, buildings, water, squares, bridges, and parks. But underneath that… Behind a window in Slotervaart, a desperate mother prays for her daughter who is trapped in Khartoum. Walking around Gaasperplas every night is a man who dares not to sleep for fear of nightmares about the front lines. Maneuvering a stroller along the sidewalk in the Stadionbuurt is a young father who has been dragging his leg since that month in a Damascus prison. Among records of the enslaved on the Accaribo plantation in Suriname, two sisters living in Kraaiennest discover their family name. Hanging on the wall of a living room in the Indische Buurt, a photograph of an uncle who was murdered in Diyarbakır. In a hotel room on Meeuwenlaan, where she has been living for months, a woman from Kharkiv FaceTimes with her mother who stayed behind.
Such experiences increasingly haunt our streets. They make the city more sensitive. Sometimes in a grim way, sometimes vulnerable or skittish instead. Built on newcomers, Amsterdam will never be able to sequester itself from what is happening in the world beyond. The city, already so permeable, is becoming even more so. Stories from all over the world, stories from the past and present, find their place between shopping centers and office buildings. The public space, so carefully designed and arranged in a Dutch way, is filled with the capricious, unbounded presence of war and conflict.
Builders
A few of those who can speak from experience are artists. In some cases, they were so already, while for others it is the experience itself that has brought them to art. They have no choice. The confrontation with struggle, destruction, and ensuing alienation needs to be expressed. Art is a language for that. Through their work, these artists write themselves into the city. Participating in Refresh Amsterdam #2, which includes an exhibition at the Amsterdam Museum, a venue that offers space for an uncompromising encounter with fellow citizens and other visitors, is a tangible way to claim a place here. Both for themselves and for the experiences they add to the permeable, ever-shifting consciousness of Amsterdam.
No wonder that many of these artists are builders. They construct installations of screens and objects facing each other and memorials that prickle the senses. The environments they build are monuments, reception areas, and vistas all at once. Protected, but open; inviting, but also brutally honest. Experiences—and therefore artworks—that are unfamiliar to a city never built for them. Experiences from which the city perhaps recoils, and that now belong here.
There was a time in Amsterdam when artists did not venture to portray war. It rarely appeared in their work. At most, the Second World War, the occupation, and the abrupt, lasting reverberation of the disappearance of the Jews from the city’s streetlife. Artists were expected to keep distance, to eschew direct expressions of violence and injustice in other places and times. Often, they would sooner choose in-depth research into the means they used, the technique, and the legitimacy of the visual language in their practice. The question of the relationship between what they sought to depict and the image itself consumed time and attention. This also pertained to art criticism, exhibition policy, and academies. It resulted in a worthwhile artistic practice, yet one removed from the harsh reality.
Until so many bloody wars and conflicts invaded Amsterdam that artists could no longer hang back. In fact, they bore the reality into the city themselves. And they continue to do so. Violence, their personal lives, and their artistic practice are all inextricably intertwined. Distance between the severity of the world and the vulnerability or even the militancy of their work is no longer possible. In Amsterdam, too, war, conflict, and art are as one.
Battlefields
The Amsterdam Museum’s definition of war or conflict is not delimited in any way. The invitation let artists freely choose which battle they wanted to fight, flee, denounce, or immortalize.
The motivation was obvious: the war in Ukraine, and with it the arrival of Ukrainians in Amsterdam. It is a war that, more than any other, dominated the news here. For a few weeks the city was bathed in yellow and blue. After decades of involvement in other wars—in Bosnia, Mali, Iraq, Afghanistan—this is the first for the Netherlands, and therefore its capital, that feels like it involves “us.” The horror is omnipresent. Yet, after the initial shock, questions arise. Which “us” does this actually concern? There are population groups in Amsterdam preoccupied with other wars. Why does this war overshadow so many other forms of conflict, far away or close to home? Where, in the geopolitical strife, is the personal struggle? How does the Netherlands defend international human rights and sovereignty, while inequality and dependency are rampant at home? Is there a place for the abhorrences of the past alongside the terror of the present? And for their effect to this day?
This exhibition provides an answer: the artists take the liberty to enter other battlefields other than the most conspicuous. Not one Ukrainian artist is counted among the selected participants. (Only Vika Mitrichenko from Minsk has family living there. Her fragile but unbroken jars testify to this.) Perhaps artists from Ukraine who found their way to Amsterdam were still lost in the chaos of migration. Maybe they had other things on their radar than an open call from the Amsterdam Museum. Or perhaps it was too soon for them to write themselves a place in the city.
The others each define war and conflict in their own way, and their work itself is the definition. Sometimes it seems drenched with strife, while at others it is painfully analytical. Mourning and rage and coolheaded investigation alternate in turn. Often the personal connection is unmistakable; but occasionally the work seems to have completely detached itself from the biography. The stylistic or artisanal ability is impressive, whether reflected in tried-and-true techniques or a fervent quest for the form and material which could fulfill the impetus. The work is majestic or subdued, meticulously documented or impetuously militant, steeped in loss or intent on honoring what has been lost, and perhaps even, as far as is possible, on restoring it.
Painful circle
The exhibition opens with the Mediterranean Sea, a plunge into Tina Farifteh’s immersive and space-filling video work, and concludes with a tribute by the undocumented artists of We Sell Reality to the people who have drowned in those same waters. Hence a space emerges that says: whatever conflicts you encounter today, forget not that we here in Amsterdam, one of the capitals of Europe, live on a continent at war with its guests. Faced with a cold-hearted authority, they are incapable of defending themselves; they reach the mainland as unwanted visitors—or they drown and perish.
Farifteh and We Sell Reality provide no ready-made definition. They understand war as a permanent state of arbitrariness and violence, which also colors the highly secured inner zone, of which Amsterdam is a part, on a daily basis. Theirs is a horizontal definition: a condition that echoes in other forms of strife in the city. A sonorous undertone.
Other artists show how war and conflict also operate vertically: buried in history, they are exhumed through the surface of the present. Take, for instance, the sea. It is deadly today, but it was deadly in the past as well. Victor Sonna asks us to watch from the cellars of Elmina Castle in Ghana, where people were loaded onto ships, destined for a life of bondage in Suriname. Then, too, people died at sea. Even then, there were those who survived. And had children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren. Who have now ended up in Amsterdam and, in the protest paintings by Marcel van den Berg, wage war on Babylon, or shine on Sithabile Mlotshwa’s royally feathered gown. A definition of war and conflict could also be: they will never pass, they are never lost forever.
And they leave traces. Scars on the exterior, like the Yusef Boys by Susanne Khalil Yusef, shot dead when far too young; on the subconscious, as in Ayşen Kaptanoğlu’s nightmare images; on everyday life, seen in the grieving living rooms of Handan Tufan; and on memory, like in Senka Milutinović’s reconstruction of what a bombardment inflicts.
This reconstruction, casually and cleverly built up, shows what makes life so complex in a city where a growing array of war recollections gust through the streets. No one’s memory is the same. And no one handles their memories in the same way. Some resist, unwilling to face them, while others embrace them, freezing their lives at that moment the bombs fell. Each event branches into many stories. And all those troubled stories pass each other on the crosswalks of cities like this one.
What materializes in the Amsterdam Museum is a painful circle of images that stare at each other and are stared at in turn, a panopticon of wars and conflicts. If they can be defined at all, then perhaps it should be as this: they continue to do their devastating, disruptive work long after they have ended.
The black hole
This is not work at a distance. Many of the artists put themselves on the line. The engagement is real and lived through. They attempt to reduce the gap between the image and what they want to depict to the absolute minimum. Which makes the black hole in the midst all the more provocative: the deep, instantaneous shock of the moment itself, the explosion, the blow, the mind-shattering cavity as the aggression rams inside, the death.
Which is what is fascinating and tragic about this exhibition. Everything revolves around that black hole, the essence of all this work, but it evades depiction. See how the artists circle it, how they assault it, study it from all sides, with tears in the eyes, with anger pulsing through the veins, how they try to reconstruct why this had to occur, determined to close it and to heal something of what has been broken. They cannot get any closer, yet they still want to. They must transform the grief and the fury into something shareable with the city, and no language but art gives them that possibility, but the attempt will fail. They know it. And they refuse to give in. Here, nobody capitulates to the impossible.
Conversation
Every glaring injustice shared with us here—from slavery to femicide, from blockaded escape routes to the murder of innocent civilians—deserves attention in its own right. At the same time, together they form a route through all possible forms of injustice, past and present, that some Amsterdammers carry with them and that everyone else breathes in, whether they are aware of it or not. The artworks converse with each other. Almost all of them remain entrenched in their own structure, but the visitor is free to move on to the next. Who, sooner or later, cannot help but ask the question: What do all these forms of injustice, these wars and conflicts, have to do with each other? Do they work hand in glove? Does one evoke the next? Do we exist in a society that is constructed in such a way as to produce and reproduce this kind of violence? And does the song of mourning, the cry of rage, the surgical diagnosis of one artwork hold significance for the disaster staring the next in the eye? Does the comforting work that can also be found here—the Hobo mosque by Nasam Abboud, Yazan Maksoud, and Roua Jafar, which banishes the use of political language; the conversation garden by Ratu R. Saraswati; the memorial cloths woven by Kristina Benjocki—have value as a point of respite in between the fury of the others? Such moments of calm are important if the questions keep coming. Is this self-perpetuating cycle of war and conflict susceptible to sabotage? And is art capable of doing that?
The final question, inevitable in this context: What does all this work say about the city in which we live? Remarkably enough, Amsterdam itself is hardly depicted in clear terms. All those buildings, squares, canals, and parks are absent. As are almost all inhabitants. As if the city speaks for itself and requires no further attention. Yet, simultaneously, the city is omnipresent. Because in Amsterdam, more than ever, the nightmares and survival strategies of these artists haunt the streets.
Chris Keulemans is an author, journalist, moderator, and educator.