Tja Ling Hu, It’s best to harvest at full moon (2023), 41 x 29,5 cm, Potlood op steinbach papier

Solo exhibition ‘A corner of the Universe’ by artist Tja Ling Hu is on view in gallery van Fanny Freytag from April 19 until May 18.

In her work, Tja Ling explores the complexity of human existence, universal connectedness and migration movements. The pieces showcased in the exhibition are the result of her research into the influence of intergenerational transmissions on contemporary society. While eternal truths derived from myths offer wisdom and knowledge, negative behavioral patterns are also often transmitted across generations.

With the symbols that Tja Ling creates in her imagery, she invites her audience to an inner dialogue. Through self-development, a person contributes to the collective, building on the legacy of previous generations. 

Tja Ling is known for her profound drawings on paper. Following her residency at the Vincent van GoghHuis in 2023, Tja Ling has expanded her repertoire by adding ceramic sculptures and paintings. For the first time, she brings these three mediums together, in the exhibition 'A Corner of the Universe'.   

Tja Ling (1987) graduated in 2010 with a Bachelor of Design towards fashion. After realizing that the fashion world was not for her, Tja Ling discovered her passion for drawing. She graduated from the Luca School of Arts in Ghent in 2011 with a Bachelor of Arts after which she completed a Master in Fine Arts in 2016. In 2017, she won the Fiep Westendorp Incentive Award. Tja Ling has previously shown work at Fanny Freytag's brother; gallery Vriend van Bavink, Beurs van Berlage, het Scheepvaart Museum and Museum IJsselstein. In 2023 she completed her residency at the Vincent van GoghHuis, during which she expanded her artistic repertoire, adding painting and ceramics. Her work is currently on show in the Amsterdam Museum as part of exhibition series Collecting the City #4. 

Tja Ling, Joshua tree (2024), 36 x 27 cm, Potlood op steinbach

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My Ghostly MRI’s

Solo exhibition by Femi Dawkins

From March 22nd, solo exhibition 'My Ghostly MRI’s' by artist Femi Dawkins is on view at gallery van Fanny Freytag.

Femi Dawkins shows a series of MRI's, an ongoing research project consisting of paper works with Lapis Lazuli, beetroot, salt and Indian Ink. My Ghostly MRI’s is a meditation on grief, faces abstracted into emotional landscapes.

As a child of the Diaspora and it’s migratory movements, Dawkins journeys through in-between worlds. His work focuses on these fractured narratives and the significance of personal narratives that translate into universal truths. 

Shaheen Merali, Curator/ Artist based in London said about Femi's MRI's: 

My Ghostly MRI’s are envisaged by the Jamaican born, Netherlands  and London based, artist Femi Dawkins as a series of haunting portraits deploying mix media practice to obliquely articulate memory, and radical loss. Dawkins' involvement with diverse visual notations has enabled him to depict the condition he describes as the “silence grown to a punctuation.” For Dawkins, My Ghostly MRI’s provoke our imaginations to push boundaries and social attitudes which otherwise would remain archival documents “failing a beginning.”  

Femi Dawkins is an independent artist, he graduated with a MFA from Goldsmiths University London with distinction (2022). He won the Gieskes-Strijbis Podiumprijs (2022) together with Kate Moore, he was the first recipient of the Lisson Gallery scholarship (2022), was selected as a New Contemporaries artist (2021), and was awarded the the Ford Fellowship (1991-90). He received his BA/BS from Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, NY (1989) and is an alumni of La Guardia High School of Music and Art (1984).

He has exhibited his work in the exhibitin ‘Rites Of Passage’ curated by Péjú Oshin (2023) in Gagosian Gallery at the Brittania Street gallery in London and the South London gallery, Capital C in Amsterdam, Firstsite in Colchester, Barnsdale Municipal Gallery in Los Angeles and CC Pounder Gallery in Los Angeles. 

Femi Dawkins, about the opening night

In the process of making My Ghostly MRI's,

  I channel what's inside the enslaved body and the lived experience of a life in handcuffs or the constant threat of handcuffs.

My mournful rendition of Motherless Child amidst my work was filled with vulnerability and grief. 

It comes from the same place as the tears that flow like washing the bodies in perpetual quietness looking for sovereignty of purpose.

 What it is like, to live a life unremarked upon, but visited by violence, for violence sake. 

No one likes seeing a black man on his knees, it recalls Rodney King and many other countless and nameless bodies whipped and mashed into submission to pain death and terror.

Yet there I was circling my work, head downturned  singing Motherless Child, my knees dragging across the floors of the gallery.

Each round my voice getting louder and louder.

Recalling the transatlantic voyages of past ships and lost dead souls thrown overboard without a care, and buried deep under water and in soil.

The countless nameless faces and bodies broken  and thrown on beds of  antebellum medical schools and experimented on and thrown in graves unmarked and unremarked without names or even a mournful peep of anyone caring.   I was performing poetry as prayer. Attempting to visualize the spiritual by spirit conjuring

"Far away from home a language like a man can lose face, hang its head in shame and wither into silence. I became by loving myself, loveless motherless child." 

Through sonic reflection in the form of music and poetry , in this case singing  Motherless Child, 

I sought a deeper engagement with the forgotten histories and the suppressed forms of diasporic memories.

The sonic presented at My Ghostly MRI solo exhibition, are the poetics of words and the visual of falling down, are all contributing to the ground swell of being present in the moments of trauma and joy, a transformation of silence and being silenced into language and action.

Of black bodies that escape like angry liquids, somewhere, to catch their breath.

the blue Vein

That vibrates

Under the surface of the black skin,

Who is talking? 

From what under water

and lost country ocean

will you return me The bone and the eye

The mouth 

And the sound.”

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CAESURA //

A Perception of Silence

Group exhibition ‘Caesura’ is on view in the gallery from the 9th of February until the 16th of March.

This exhibition brings together a selection of pieces by Azul Ehrenberg, Johnny Mae Hauser and Aldo van den Broek.

In a fast paced world filled with stimuli, even the slightest perception of silence can be significantly valuable. What happens in this fleeting moment of quiet presence?

Azul Ehrenberg (1997) is an emerging interdisciplinary artist who graduated from the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in 2022, she is based between Mexico and Amsterdam. Among other projects, she showed her graduation work in the exhibition '34 ondergaande zonnen' at gallery Vriend van Bavink. In her work she dominantly uses a combination of self-made paper, visual poetry and moving image. Azul said about her work in the upcoming show: 'The works in 'CAESURA' might all together form a journey through my subconscious. The images represent moments of wandering in and out of what's real and imaginary.' 

Johnny Mae Hauser (1997) is known for her sensitive ways of capturing the obscure existence of human emotion. An incomprehensible stillness can be found in her images, which are recognisable by their soft and at times cool colour schemes. The Dutch-German artist who graduated in 2022 from the KABK challenges us to see beyond the traditional ways of looking at photography. She already has several solo exhibitions on her name and is paving her way to becoming an internationally recognized artist. 

Aldo van den Broek (1985) creates charged, texturized canvases and sculptures by using scrap materials that he carefully selects from the street such as cardboard, wood, fabrics, plastic, and metals. He reframes and re-contextualizes his subject and combines technical mastery with playful assemblage techniques. These resulting stills defy straightforward interpretation as he questions our fast-paced society, exploring love, death, and the existential.

Article about the exhibition in Het Parool

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