Sabine Groenewegen - Under Erasure

Under Erasure
2022, Multichannel installation

A poetic forensics across time traces a line between the intimate histories of rubber, exploitation of women, early Dutch cinema, and other narrative machines which shaped and erased the experiences of those who generated the profits of the Dutch 20th-century global rubber industry.
A forensic journey with mediated gestures of translation on various archival materials on display, Adaptation interrogates the narrative construction and erasure by the colonial apparatus.

The film Rubber (1936) was based on the 1931 novel of the same name by author Madelon Székely-Lulofs, which attracted both praise and recrimination for depicting a critical image of life in a Dutch colonised rubber plantation in Sumatra, Indonesia. When the rights of the book were sold to a Dutch filmmaker, the colonial planter’s community heavily influenced the process of adaptation, ensuring a positive depiction of their practices. Székely-Lulofs kept newspaper clippings following the film’s production process and wrote critical remarks onto them with blue pencil.

Another room discloses this material from Lulof’s private archive, and introduces the artist’s intervention upon them through her own annotations. Székely-Lulof’s newspaper clippings are presented alongside other archival materials: a portrait of the actress Amsy Moina, who was cast in the film and later removed without explanation; and her credit score which act as evidence of her initial presence. Annotations contextualise, and translate key parts of Dutch text into English, superimposed over the materials via a transparent layer.

EXHIBITION

1646 Experimental Art Space
Curators: curated by Johan Gustavsson and Clara Pallí.

SUPPORTED BY