What gets lost in a translation? What can we learn from unsaid things?
And how is that silenced shaped? What do forgotten words, books, libraries and archives still tell us? Can we liberate ourselves from assumptions and pose questions instead?
In the HüzünProject she initiated with Nihat Karataslı she participated in the IKSV Research Programme in Istanbul. She worked for After the Archive? an initiative that gains attention to silenced archives and questions the role of archives in the creation of public memory in Turkey.
She likes to curate exhibitions in unexpected spaces, like an archival box that once belonged to Ulises Carrión: No Todo ~ Niet Alles or the public ferry that crosses the waters of Amsterdam for the Amsterdam Ferry Festival. At the end of 2021 she became the artistic director of HMK: an exhibition space an artist-in-residence programme located in a 17th century chapel.
She teached at the MA programme F for Fact at the Sandberg Institute and the Language and Image Department at the Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam. She is also a teacher at the Fine Arts Bachelor programme at Minerva Art Academy in Groningen. Although her practice is about things that cannot be said with words, she sometimes writes for art magazines like Mister Motley.

21 June 2019 - 17:00
Kick-off No Todo ~ Niet Alles
Johan Deumens Archive
Westerdok 782
This tiny exhibition aims at expanding a network and connecting artists by means of their ideas around translation, mailable art and affection for books in a digital world. They expand the definition of what a library, a book, a sentence and a word can be. Their works inhabit that exciting emptiness in between the lines of a text, the blank space of a page or inside a forgotten archival box.
No Todo - Niet Alles takes place in an archival box that once belonged to the legendary archive of Ulises Carrión in Amsterdam. The box reappeared from the shelves of another archive of artists' books maintained by Johan Deumens. As a thread from a lost carpet, this box connects two archival structures: the archive of Ulises Carrión and the archive of Johan Deumens.
According to Johan Deumens, Carrión was a philosopher and essayist who finally became an artist of appearance and disappearance. His speciality was infiltration —into a certain medium— only to disappear again. In the most ideal case, he would stay invisible, as a strategic, abstract entity. His strongest points were never the lasting and tangible; his practice was more about initiating collaborations. When Carrión's archive was dismantled in 1989, Johan Deumens secured the empty archival boxes and took them to his own archive, where he started using them to host other publications. As time passed and because the cardboard boxes were not acid free and did not meet conservation standards, they were discarded and apparently disappeared totally. That is, until one day, 30 years later, when one of these boxes turned up in a corner of the archive where even the archivist Deumens himself didn't think it could be.
Its reappearance brought along an empty space filled with intriguing questions. If the function of an archive is conservation, why does oblivion always lurk upon every document it contains? And if the purpose of an archive is to survive time, why do archival methods become so rapidly outdated?
The exhibition takes place in the space of Carrión's archival box, with contributions by artists that devote their practice to the contradictions inherent within every archive. It connects artists through photocopied publications, visible and invisible gestures, mailed work, objects that create letters and documents of etymological dissections. They all co-exist in the exciting emptiness of this archival box.
Since an archive doesn't have an end or closing date and comes with a proposition towards infinity, this exhibition will continue to grow with more contributions over time by artists responding and relating to the topics and strategies that drove Ulises Carrión's practice. In this way, the ongoing exhibition No Todo - Niet Alles shows that these strategies and ideas are very much still alive and relevant today. It acknowledges the inherent incompleteness of an archive, the various shapes a text can take, how words can be translated and the unexpected ways to inhabit the empty space of an archival box.
With contributions by,:
Annesas Appel
Ricardo Cardenas
Jimena Croceri
Enric Farres Durán
Sibylle Eimermacher/Martin Brandsma
Jordi Ferreiro
Anett Frontzek
Ton Martens
Vibeke Mascini
Eva Parra
Ulises Books Philadelphia
Martín La Roche
Rosa Sijben
Peter Roland Spaans
Berkay Tuncay
Omar Vega Macotela
Peter Vermeulen
Robin Waart
Mariken Wessels
and more to come as the exhibition expands over time..
Many thanks to: Valentina Gutierrez, Corinne Groot, Monica Mays, Camilo Otero, Anna Penalva, Eline Piso, Tineke Reijnders, Mitchell Thar and Wieger Windhorst