Rafting down river ganges
16th of July to 29th of August, 2020
Althuis Hofland Fine Arts
Exhibition text
To the flaming floorboards, and burning white walls
artificial light and hours spent inside
the kitchen were potions are made, gold leaf ceilings and freshly dug graves
concrete foundations and ridiculous tales
We will set sail in the morning
raft on raft on,
till morning becomes boring
-
I set up shop in Ayesha and my apartment in Brussels and started painting without knowing for what and when these works would be manifested. It became a time of isolation, two people in an apartment making works; thinking about the outside.
To challenge myself, I went on a diet.
I started munching carrots and devouring fennel for breakfast.
I started painting more and more, and our apartment turned into a more colorful place, to my happiness but to the building’s expense.
Paintings became friends, and strangers were drooling about them in our living room.
We started hanging works from our balcony. Making paintings and spreading them around the neighborhood.
One fine night, I forgot about my diet. I had a few too many beers and too many cigarettes. I had failed my one mission. By morning, I was worried. I had no cigarettes left. It was a mundane misery, but there was a sense of adventure in my worries.
I rallied out into the streets to find my usual night shop closed, turned a right to find another one open nearby luckily.
The lady and the man in there were friendly, from india, and I think they could either see my hunger or smell my inner adventures pouring out through the pores of my skin. They handed me a package of tobacco and while they did that, I spotted the sentence, the sentence that encouraged this show to come along, ‘River rafting on the Ganges’. It was an old tourist attraction poster hanging in the back of the shop. It stuck in my mind. The implication of the poster was for me to make a happy trip out of something with very heavy connotations. A holy river and a heavily polluted river. A place where you see burning bodies and trash floating down the stream. A source of cleansing and pollution. A mythical place of dilemma. This is not an illustration, this is a thought.
I asked Roos Hermsen, Henrik Drescher, Marja Bloem, Dee Hehewerth, Peter Thage, Nash Tarttelin, Stig Frederik Priiskorn, Sara Milio and Jeanine Hofland to write texts for a book about the sentence ‘Rafting Down River Ganges’. I’m very thankful for this, and big thanks to all the artists for contributing and making this possible.
Mt Tub, 40 x 30 cm, acrylic, gouache on cotton, 2020
The room, 40 x 30 cm, acrylic, gouache on canvas, 2020
Shelter, 40 x 30 cm, acrylic, gouache on cotton, 2020