In (DE)Constructing Places upcoming artist Eugenie Boon shows a series of works that invite us to think about ways to deconstruct repressing and limiting frames and build new ones.
Eugenie Boon (Willemstad, Curacao 1995) is a multidisciplinary artist whose works revolve around her upbringing on the island of Curaçao and the island's historical relation to the Netherlands. In her attempt to understand the subtle complexities she encounters in her daily life, she is constantly confronted with the aspect of duality. For example, on topics like religion, colonialism, gender, inequality and identity. Finding a balance in duality comes back in her performances, installations, video works and paintings and according texts. In a shamanistic, playful, poetic yet still critical way, personal experiences are mixed with question social-political issues and cultural institutional structures. As spectators, we are challenged to recognise ourselves and perhaps reflect on our own position.
To nos hendenan (Our people)
This series of paintings portrays not individual people, but the typical way of living in Curaçao. At the same time, they question the way we perceive culture by stereotyping. By combining visual language that is seen as typically Caribbean, like bright joyful colours with details and materials from the midclass, she reveals more complex underlying stories about the origin and consequences of social hierarchy.
Through my father’s lens 2x
This series of paintings deals with the cultural heritage that is being passed from generation and the appropriation of one’s own life. The works are inspired on the professional photographs her father made for which she acted as his muse. By representing these scenes in her own way, Boon investigates the benefits and the loss of this heritage.
Romanticizing the American dream
This work can be considered both as an oath to her father’s work as a critical statement about the objective position women are being pushed in from an early age. The rose and the red-hearted teddy bear are symbols of Valentine and its dream of innocent and romantic love but at the same time highly commercialized objects. The same can be said of women that are being merchandised in families as dowry to climb the social strata.
Krese par’i pia pa nabega den bida (grow pair of legs to navigate life)
This work is also dealing with how social hierarchy negatively influences one’s capability to perform and how this is transmitted through generations. Even in today’s ownership of a country, you can retrace the colonial history. Starting point for this work is the way an elder or an exalted authority can be experienced. This is imagined by the scene and by details as a halo, the DNA structures that form the two figures and the yellow waves that are transmitters of information. As in other works the colors red and blue are prominent as they symbolize the more reactive or proactive way we can respond to inequality.
At'e Wega! (The game/ the Situation!)
In Eugenie Boons works, board games are a recurrent theme. Although playful they mirror power belief systems in a society and because of their accessibility they can become very normative. In this installation, the very European board game monopoly forms the base for a performance, in which a typical song from childhood in Curaçao is connected to the trade aspect. It shows an alternative strategy to communicate about painful histories.
Bonkon’e (Good with Thou)
The work of Eugenie Boon shows a world of transformance in which generations, languages, people, cultures and media are connected and questioned. In this installation, we see the typically Dutch wooden shoes in between two objects that are enlarged symbols from a card game that is known as Bonkon’e (Good with Thou). Not bred in Dutch culture, the people in Curaçao adopted and created a game that is similar to the European card game but with more ambiguous figures that question the sexuality of man and woman.
Pega Saya
Another important way of showing the duality in her art is to perform as her alter ego Pega Saya, the child of Kompa Nanzi (a.ka. Anasi) a folktale character originated in West Africa, but these tales travelled to the Caribbean by the way of the Trans-Atlantic Slave trade. Anasi is sometimes considered to be the god of all knowledge of stories and as the role of a trickster one of the most important characters of the West African, African American and Caribbean folklore. In her performance, Boon uses these masks or heads that stand for the different possible responses, from red reactive anger to proactive blue, all about finding balance within duality.