“Sex Work Is Honest Work”. Anyone strolling through Arnhem these days should be surprised when they suddenly find themselves in the middle of the city in front of the green-red flickering neon installation. What is she doing here?
In the twelfth edition of the traditional Sonsbeek Biennale in Arnhem, the Netherlands, everything revolves around work this time. And Olu Oguibe, the creator of the shrill band of light, invited curator Bonaventure Ndikung because he’s always good for provocation. At the last Documenta in Kassel, the US-Nigerian artist sparked a bitter dispute with his obelisk for the unknown migrant. Will the residents of the peaceful capital of the province of Gelderland on the Nederrijn react in a similar way to his visual plea for a profession that is generally not counted among the “essential” ones?
Even the most sophisticated curatorial essays cannot avoid colonialism in Arnhem
Strangely enough, Sonsbeek is running under the radar in the sprawling field of biennials. The art festival, founded in 1949, is six years older than the Documenta. The founding motive was the same: After the devastating destruction in World War II, art was supposed to force social and cultural “reconstruction”. Its basic theme is “Bona”, as the art world calls the doctor of biotechnology, whom it emerges from the anti-colonialist slates at the speed of light grassroots catapulted to the top of one of the most important German cultural institutes in Neukölln, as stringent as it is time-conscious. Because the curatorial decisions in Arnhem are inevitably read like the future handwriting of the man who will head the House of World Cultures in Berlin as director from 2023.
In an old factory shed on the outskirts of the city, the Egyptian filmmaker Nader Mohamed Saadallah dedicates three melancholy videos to dying trades: a metal smith, a calligrapher and tea workers. Mae-Ling Lokko and Gustavo Crembil, an Argentine-American architectural duo, have hung a sculpture made of building blocks made of thread-like mushroom cells five meters above the ground in Sonsbeek. They are supposed to set organic production in motion – a symbol of non-human work.
Black and white contrast. In Arnhem’s “Witte Villa” in Sonsbeek Park, the Amsterdam collective “The Black Archives” is spreading documents of black emancipation in the Netherlands.
(Photo: Sonsbeek 20-24 / Django van Ardenne / Django van Ardenne)
Even the most sophisticated curatorial essays in Arnhem cannot avoid colonialism. In the huge landscape parks of Sonsbeek and Zijpendaal, where the Biennale takes place, are the magnificent villas of the upper-class families who profited from the exploitation of the Dutch colonies in Indonesia and in Suriname, South America. The picture of idyllic contemplation is here the facade of the murderous. No wonder that this trail of blood from the city’s history runs like a red thread through the show. And if there is one picture in which work and colonialism come together impressively, then it is Kudzanai-Violet Hwami’s and Belinda Zhawi’s portrait of the “black Anna”.
The slave from Suriname came to Arnhem in 1729 at the age of 30. She lived as a maid in the park villa of the Brantsen family, who owned a plantation in Suriname, after which she got her name Anna van Vossenburg. Little more is known of the woman’s life than a visit to the doctor and her death in 178O. The two artists from Zimbabwe have draped fragments from her life around Anna’s head: the sales certificate as a slave, for example. In Soundbites they imagine episodes from a disenfranchised life that was nothing but work and has remained historically invisible.
The relentless activist against colonialism Bonaventure Ndikung can be recognized by the fact that he has placed Ndidi Dike’s statue “Redressing Lady Justice” in an old porter’s house. The Nigerian artist gave her the appearance of an African woman: a symbol of oppression during slavery. In her right hand she carries a machete, a symbol of the brutal colonizers. In her left she carries a crooked “scales of justice”. Looted objects lie in one of the bowls and figures of enslaved people in the other.
An intendant who knows where he’s from and who can think sharply
And it was certainly no coincidence that the Biennale began on the symbolic “Keti Koti Day” (the fetters will be broken). On July 1, 1863, slavery was abolished in Suriname. Amsterdam’s Mayor Femke Halsema has recently managed to apologize for the injustice of slavery, the government in The Hague is still hesitating. Now the Dutch are arguing whether they will make the informal tradition a public holiday. In Arnhem she should find many arguments for the idea.
Ndikung believes, however, that the Intendant is not practicing diplomacy in advance if he refuses to simply point fingers at each other when coming to terms with colonialism. “We are all together in this story,” he clarifies on one of the tours. “It’s about initiating the process of re-humanization.”
The formalist Ndikung can also be discovered in Arnhem. In the Kröller-Müller Museum in neighboring Otterlo, he pays a silent homage to Stanley Brouwn. Because of its subtle minimalism, many of the Dutch concept and Fluxus artists of Surinamese descent are among the most important artists of the 20th century.
Euphoric and analytical. Curator Bonaventure Ndikung speaking in Sonsbeek Park in Arnhem.
(Photo: Ingo Arend / Ingo Arend)
The scientific and aesthetic dual talent Ndikung cultivates a tendency towards academicism. His rhetoric is combative, his concepts often hermetic. In Arnhem he convinces with a sensual, poetic, musical show, which, however, always aims at the heart of the burning conflicts of the present. And in the curator himself, discursive and playful energies flow together in an electrifying way. He and his co-curators turned the Biennale press conference into a colloquium on essential work.
The next day he was rapping at the head of a black brass band with a flat cap, pine green worker’s suit and pink long shirt in the pouring rain through Sonsbeek Park. When he emphatically shouted “You can’t take away the joy from us” at the end of the interlude, one had the feeling that it wasn’t the worst thing HKW expected in a year and a half: an artistic director who knows where he’s from and who can think sharply.