Exhibition: TOTOK – INDISCH BESEF

https://www.nrc.nl/nieuws/2023/04/21/kritische-getuigenissen-over-het-indische-verleden-a4162706

07/04/23 – 29/04/23

What Art Can Do – Tweede Tuindwarsstraat 4, Amsterdam

Clementine Oomes
MAMA SAYA – IBU SAYA – MIJN MOEDER

Clementine Oomes shows poignant new work, entitled ‘Mama Saya’. It is inspired by her mother’s concentration camp past in Indonesia during World War II. Her mother spent three and a half years in captivity with her mother and her sister in a cell in the Aek Pamienke Jappenkamp (Japanese concentration camp) on Sumatra.

Oomes converts the pain of the past into an intuitive visual language. She uses optical spatiality in her work, taking the viewer into gaping voids that can be viewed as either threatening, destructive or, rather, as an escape to freedom or paradise. By means of bright white color, Oomes succeeds in abstracting the theme of captivity and making it a universal value and reality that concerns us all.

As a second-generation war victim, Oomes has personally experienced what this reality can do to people. “My mother had plunged from a fairy tale into a horrific reality. She managed to survive because she had made an armor around herself. She had to survive, but we, as children, had to survive too… later, together with her.”

TOTOK – Indisch besef

What Art Can Do
Tweede Tuindwarsstraat 4
1015 RZ Amsterdam