Healing Batik is an artistic investigation in which visual artist Nina Boas asks the question "How do trauma and cultural legacies affect future generations of artists? Boas' work is all about healing. During her residency at SBK Amsterdam, she delved into the work of her father artist Philip Boas while not avoiding confrontation. For BK Information she wrote about it.
In an intimate exhibition space, lit by a fluorescent bar and filtered daylight, hang two of my father's artworks, one vertical and one horizontal. They are silent witnesses to a shared history that I seek to understand. My desk is on a mezzanine floor, a place of reflection and encounter, where I gather my thoughts during my residency at SBK Amsterdam in July 2024. It is a time of deep research, ritual and reflection on themes such as intergenerational trauma, decolonization and healing.
Silent witnesses to a shared history I seek to understand
I am Nina Boas, visual artist and performance artist, and my work revolves around healing, both on a personal and collective level. Often my work is process-based, with performances and rituals that offer sensory experiences. During this residency, I delved into the work of my father, Philip Boas, an artist whose batik-inspired artworks carry themes of cultural identity, colonial history and personal expression. It is this legacy that I want to understand and re-contextualize, as shame and taboo were often central to our family history.
This is an artistic body of work that represents personal stories as a legacy for me, but also needs to be reinterpreted as a body of work at a time when art seems to have to account for itself in a contemporary discussion that is widely held; a discussion in this case about cultural appropriation and the appropriately thorough, contemporary analysis of what decolonization means for an artist whose work draws heavily on inspiration from art historical imagery of a former Dutch colony. I want to explore my perspective on my father's oeuvre without sidestepping this larger context.
Connection between past and present
My residency began with an artistic form of work I call "embedment": a practice in which you immerse yourself in objects and information. It's an embodied inquiry. How does my father's work resonate? Trying to integrate somatic healing techniques into my personal quest for artistic reflection, I perform a ritual with masks I made myself. Each part of the ritual has its own meaning and symbolism. For example, the moss mask allows me to see, while the moss, a protected plant, symbolizes the preservation of the vulnerable. I also use a homemade mugwort collar, which is known for its protective and lucid properties and keeps me from unwanted influences during my process.
The ritual involves an examination of how physical interaction with a work of art in the artistic process of creation both inspires the craft of a tradition-inspired making process, and also how this physical act of craft analysis in interpretation brings a perspective of respect and singular artistic devotion to the cultural resources to which my father wanted to respond. His upright posture in old photographs reminds me of colonial family portraits and I adopt to feel through what such a posture is, while his crouched position in his studio reminds me of Indonesian people during travels in my youth. In that same position, I make drawings of a veiled body, which I display in space.
What is healing? What does it mean to carry trauma from our ancestors?
These drawings are from a series that emerged after a family constellation and are a way of processing my visits to depots where my father's work lies. During the ritual, I wrap a silk cloth, once given to me by my father, around myself. As I hold my grandfather's journal and an article from my father, I begin to shake. This raises questions that underlie my artistic research: What is healing? What does it mean to carry trauma from our ancestors? How can we decolonize our artistic practice in a world still struggling with the aftermath of colonialism?
Encounters and stories
During my residency, I had extraordinary encounters. One was with a 90-year-old man, a camp survivor who survived typhus as a child in a Japanese camp. While looking at my father's works, he talked about how he had experienced hallucinations during his illness and talked about trauma as "drawers in our bodies that can open unexpectedly." These kinds of social interactions with audiences and their stories are essential to my work. They show that art is not just something to look at, but also a medium to bring people together and create space for conversation, so that image leads to an act of belonging as collective reflection. Exploring my father's provisional artistic legacy gives me the opportunity to acknowledge and process traumas that his work always touched and represented in part, not only for myself but also for others.
Repeating images and digital experiments
During my residency, I also created a video, together with Zoe D'amaro, incorporating images my father sent me over the past few years via WhatsApp. It became a triptych of repeating images of his living environment: the landscape, his messy studio and his cats. The video offers an intimate glimpse into his daily life and provides a way for me to understand his world, which is so intertwined with mine.
In addition, I experimented with augmented reality (A.R.) to bring together questions surrounding my father's work in a digital layer. This digital work is an extension of my research, combining physical objects and rituals with new technologies. By adding A.R. as an experiential layer, I create an additional dimension for reflection, in which visitors can navigate through the images themselves and connect to the work in their own way.
Intergenerational trauma and decolonization
An important part of my research is how we deal with intergenerational trauma and the at all murky or at least limited meaning of the concept of a cultural legacy that socially always has connections to a broader and socially collective shared past. My father's artworks are often stored in museums and depots as silent witnesses to a postcolonial reality that cannot be experienced in isolation from history. This raises questions: How can we revive forgotten artworks, when the questions prove more complex than individual artistic interpretation? How can we tell the stories of these works in a way that is relevant to our time?
Decolonizing the art world is an urgent issue. Art institutions are reviewing their collections and trying to uncover traces of colonialism. I want to explore how my father's art and my own work can contribute to this dialogue. His batik-inspired works tell a story of cultural exchange, but also bear the scars of a colonial history.
An invitation to dialogue
The presentation of my work at the end of the residency was an invitation to dialogue. Through projections, archival images, live drawing and voice recordings, I invited visitors to participate in my search for healing. The ritual I performed, which combined fairy tales and somatic movements, aimed to initiate a healing process not only for myself, but for everyone present.
The project Healing Batik invites reflection on our shared history and the possibilities for healing. At a time when the art world is searching for ways to face its colonial past, this project offers a different perspective on how we can deal with trauma and cultural identity.
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