Walking down one of Groningen’s main streets toward the Noorderlicht art space, I couldn't help but notice the number of “ethnic” shops selling “African” goods and foods. Some of them reconstruct the architecture and furniture style of the cultures they represented: a grocery shop styled as a souk, its bright yellow façade designed to resemble the entrance of a generic, traditional “Arabic” market. Groningen, in the northern part of the Netherlands, is a city of circa 238,147 inhabitants, many of them students drawn by its university. One can walk its historical center in fifteen minutes before entering a green and quiet residential area. Against that backdrop, the number of Indonesian, Vietnamese, and West African shops felt strikingly disproportionate, competing as they do with the big franchises and cheese manufacturers for which the region is known. But we know that their presence speaks to a continuity of history, in the Netherlands’ case, a colonial one.
It was this continuity, and its hold on the present, that the curators Musoke Nalwoga and Roosje Klap, in collaboration with Koen Bartijn, set out to bring to the surface through “What Knots Knot Knots”, a three-venue exhibition in which eight artists were invited to create new work based on research into local archives and stories from the region. The artists on show refuse to abide by the colonial apologetic function of the archive. Instead, they reclaim ways to narrate their own stories: dispossessed, diasporic, overshadowed, yet encoded right there among the urban centers of the towns and in the land around them. These stories are the knots that need to be knotted: dots in a cartography of absence overlaying the geography of the Netherlands, one the exhibition traces across three locations in three regions, Drenthe, Groningen, and Friesland.
Groningen
At Noorderlicht, a space where photography and lens-based media find not just priority but critical articulation through their productive and reproductive roles in identity, I met work by Ofri Cnaani and Yeb Wiersma. I spent a good deal of time with Cnaani’s video installation, Re-Collect, Re-Correlate, Re-colonise (2026), a poetic inquiry into the epigenetics of trauma and its somatic manifestations. Told in the first person, the work follows the condition of MCTD, a disease that stiffens muscles and places pressure on the heart, accompanied by the formation of keloids, or scar tissue on the skin. It’s a condition that often affects African people, resembling, as the artist points out, the scars left by the torture of whipping during plantation enslavement. The body becomes a counter-archive of that violence, narrowing the gap between temporalities and the bodily experience of slavery: an uncensorable trace.
Ofri Cnaani, Re-Collect, Re-Correlate, Re-colonise (2026). © Hanne van der Velde
Yeb Wiersma’s installation Garden Rehearsals (2026) moves the archive in the direction of the non-human, departing from the ecotect garden Louis le Roy created in Groningen in 1970, a model of contested architecture and contradiction, where wilderness and coexistence were nurtured amid plunder and extraction. The garden sits in the suburb of Lewenborg, named after Evert Lewe, a shareholder of the West-Indische Compagnie (WIC). From this site, and with the support of the neighborhood's community, Wiersma built a template for a collective living archive: printed material and small objects, poetic fragments, and stories of resistance to the land's exploitation, gathered from indentured laborers brought through the region via the logistics of newly built railways. The installation is woven together with vines, a symbol both of migrant communities’ resilience and of a disruption to that same linear logistics.
Yeb Wiersma, Garden Rehearsals (2026).
Not part of the official show, but a resonant contribution to understanding Groningen’s role in colonial trade nonetheless, was a vlog by Marlot Geschiedenis and the "young director," which follows them on the trail of Jan Albert Sichterman, a director of the Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie (VOC) who lived in Groningen in the eighteenth century. He enriched himself through colonialism, and, as a way of displaying his power, built a large house on the Ossenmarkt, the porch of which was held up by two statues of enslaved people, an open and unselfconscious representation of the labor that sustained the wealth reaching Europe. That porch was later dismantled, and its memory now lives only in archives and old photographs, removed apparently out of shame or decency. The vlog also traces the history of Westerbork Camp, a labor camp to which, in the twentieth century, Moluccan Royal Netherlands East Indies Army (KNIL) soldiers and their families were sent after serving alongside the Dutch in the war against Indonesian independence—the site had also served as a Jewish ghetto before it was finally dismantled in 1975. The vlog moves through what remains: nothing, beyond a few sparse markers. Erased from the space like Sichterman’s statues, but kept alive through interviews with the people who lived there and who still recall its dehumanizing conditions. We see here, ingrained in Dutch memory culture, a force contrary to that guiding the exhibition: an impulse toward obscuring the past.
One of the vlog’s closing scenes lands on a striking question: isn’t it strange that a place so violent and degrading also held tenderness and familiarity for those living in it? The question stayed with me next to Cnaani's keloids and Sichterman's dismantled porch, of modernity built by excluding and segregating those who built it, subjugation staged to affirm racial and rational superiority, and still, underneath, forms of resistance and tenderness insisting on agency, subjecthood, humanity. It is the erasure of these locations, still filling Groningen’s public space, that makes What Knots Knot Knots feel urgent: not simply a call to remember, but to re-memorize, to bring these histories back into consciousness on different terms.
Friesland
This thought travelled with me to the second venue. A train crossing pastures dotted with cows brought me to Friesland, to VHDG, a historical artist-led space in Leeuwarden hosting work by Cihad Caner, Thato Toeba, and Jori(k) A. Galama. Here, the exhibition clearly resonates with its rural surroundings. Yntolerânsje (2026), Galama’s video work, is a half-fictional documentary that uncannily narrates Dutch colonialism through the displacement of cows. Frisian livestock were indeed exported across the colonies by means of Western logistics, inevitably altering the landscapes in which they arrived. The work imagines the cows as “co-whisperers,” telling the story themselves, living evidence of that past: the dairy and cattle industry as a means of expanding colonial economies worldwide—even into populations that were largely lactose intolerant. Milk, the video confirms, is a core European commodity. What stuck with me in particular were found images from a cartoon in which the cows were always black and the milk was always white, overflowing to reach everywhere, a representation that made me think of the underlying exploitative relations with racialized populations: those milked of their labor, culture, and territory to produce wealth for their subjugators. Frisian cows are everywhere now, a livestock that still represents Dutch power, a small, permanent monument to the fact that colonialism is formally over but never quite finished.
Jori(k) A. Galama, Yntolerânsje (2026)
Thato Toeba’s installation you are cold. you are warm (2026) continues in this register: a series of wooden panels, one after another, printed with photomontages, some parts cut out so that the panel behind shows through. The photomontage roams the photographic archive of Historisch Centrum Leeuwarden to rescue traces of the infrastructural apparatus that supported the enslavement of people around the world, an infrastructure that is not only physical and tangible but epistemological and ontological as well. It needs to flatten the “other”, the racialized person, into the role of the slave, and set it against the “civilized” subject, which, in the Netherlands, was the bourgeois Christian (unquestionably white). Here, the question of the archive is the question of the production of subjectivity: the archive produces by safeguarding the right to existence and the right to remembrance, while it negates by obscuring those very rights. The photomontage depicts Black sociality, Black lives, but what we see, and how we see it through the woodcuts, depends on how we position ourselves. A question of positionality and perspective: who is entitled to look and remember, and who must perform visibility to become visible.
Thato Toeba, you are cold. you are warm (2026)
The last work in the space was Cihad Caner’s wood-engraved installation Hooft, Dulband, Sylvestris (2026), which departs from an inquiry into the public space of Leeuwarden and how it discloses layers of contested history. A gable stone in the town depicts an idealized image of a Turkish person wearing a turban. The figure seems out of place, but it isn’t: another symbol has been naturalized as Dutch, not unlike the Dutch icon of the tulip, imported into the Netherlands in the seventeenth century and long since folded into the state’s national identity. Tulip and turban, it so happens, share a root word: tülbent, another thread linking the symbolic and physical displacement of bodies, ecologies, and cultures. Turkish people came to the Netherlands in sizeable numbers as guest workers after the Second World War, a migratory flow that only slowed in the 1970s after a recruitment halt. Their presence here was both obscured and mythologized, something Caner’s installation honors well in an intricate bas-relief bringing tulip and Turkish person together on a journey of re-signification. The work is accompanied by the reproduction of a historical pamphlet that traces the making of the image of the Turkish migrant worker in Dutch society, its exoticization and alienation.
Cihad Caner, Hooft, Dulband, Sylvestris (2026)
Looking across the two venues, what greatly interests me is that the archive isn't handled in the same way twice, and the differences feel formal as much as conceptual. In Toeba’s and Wiersma’s work, the archive is reappropriated but stays within its own vocabulary: Toeba cuts into and layers reproductions from the Historisch Centrum Leeuwarden, panels built from other images, but still recognizably documents. Wiersma’s living archive of print material and vines formally echoes the archive’s own logic of accumulation and index, even as it grows toward recomposition with the non-human. Cnaani, Caner, and Galama instead take the archive and manipulate it into a new light, displacing it into its own materiality. Cnaani translates archival trauma directly into the body; the keloid and the stiffened muscle become the archive, no longer paper but flesh. Caner moves the gable stone and the migrant-worker pamphlet into wood engraving, a new material register entirely. Galama does something similar with the colonial trade record, translating it into the living, breathing materiality of the cow itself. Where Toeba and Wiersma rework conceptually the archive from within, Cnaani, Caner, and Galama carry it elsewhere, into skin, wood, and livestock, until the history of the material itself becomes meaningful too.
Toward a third venue, I didn’t make it, but I made it towards consciousness
I didn’t make it to the last venue in Drenthe, where work by Koos Breukel and Ana Guedes opens the wound of a haunted space further, one of complicity with genocide against Jews. Westerbork Camp, which I’d only known about through the vlog at Noorderlicht, was in fact a transit site for Jews destined for extermination camps across Germany. Everything around me already felt weighed down by grievance, an unwitnessed density I could feel even from where I stood.
The exhibition’s fragmentation, demanding to be traversed through movement, is what gave it a spatial awareness that points beyond the shows themselves, into the urban and rural landscapes of the Netherlands, where architecture, infrastructure, and symbols speak to the continuous struggle of narrating and feeling history differently. Its multiple storylines and entry points, each departing critically from the colonial archive, ask whether the nation’s colonial subconscious can be awakened where meaning and knowledge, selected by bloody hands, still burn.
What the exhibition ultimately trys to unsettle, I think, is the platitude of the “civilized subject” against which the racialized “other” is always measured: in the souks and Arabic markets recreated for consumption, in the milk moving seamlessly from Frisian pasture to international tables, in the very same Western logistics that once carried enslaved bodies and colonial goods, now rebranded as tourism and heritage, running at a similar efficiency. That logistics never announces itself as violence; it just flows, the way platitudes do, without a face, an invisible hand behind it. What stays with me is a question of noticing and relating, as a way of disrupting this logistics, of pointing to each other’s absence over monumentalism: in what is displayed and in what keeps moving, unremarked, through the pipeline we call history.
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- Cover Image:
Yeb Wiersma, Garden Rehearsals (2026).
