Image Scavenger2024, Mixed Media, 5 Sculptures & 2 VideosThe display was organized according to the research flow. Initially, the paper ( Ebony Furniture: The Distorted Image Circulation ) focused on the process of researching and understanding ebony furniture. This research project began with the symbol of the Dutch-Indonesian colonial era, specifically ebony furniture. Unlike many other colonial symbols and trends, this piece of ebony furniture stood as a symbol of the Dutch East Indies colonial construction project for three centuries.
Additionally, the emblematic image of the colonial era contributed to the conflation of various Asian cultures into a single image. Although image distortion occurred during the lengthy duplication process, the black color of ebony became established as an irreplaceable feature.
Even after the end of the colonial era, this ebony furniture continued to be displayed and traded within Dutch society as part of the colonial heritage. Among these venues, art museums are the most significant spaces for grappling with European colonial heritage. The 1883 Internationale Koloniale en Uitvoerhandel Tentoonstelling te Amsterdam and the Rijksmuseum are notable examples.
A critical flaw in the information curation by these channels is that the general public can only access information that is refined, controlled, and directed.
With the rise of the decolonization movement in Dutch society, objects symbolizing colonial heritage began to vanish from public view. Colonial furniture is among these objects, with traces disappearing from museums, which were once publicly accessible spaces. These items have since been moved to the museum’s underground storage depots. This process of biased image ownership, which began with the creation of the image of ebony furniture, continues even today as a one-sided process of image ownership in the hierarchical museum’s underground storage.
While ownership in the past involved unilateral control from a vertical hierarchy, current image ownership leads to a physical vertical flow into underground storage.
The main video (TO DD) provides information on entering the space known as the Rijksmuseum Depot, including the protocols that must be followed to exist in the space and the journey process. At the end of the video, sources and fragmentary images behind the video are provided, clearly tracing how the images were created.
In the video DD26, images of the depot space that cannot be used according to protocol are pixelated, displayed as if being scanned. This provides a glimpse into how these colonial artifacts were stored, and at the same time, the perspective moves along the grid created by the iron shelf, the central structure of the underground depot space.
As part of the decolonizing movement, I believed that the most important step was to break this one-sided, vertical link within the Netherlands. Therefore, liberating the images stored in the depot was considered the beginning of liberation in the context of colonial furniture.
In the previous Pixel video (DD 26), images are sorted by category and stored on steel shelves in each room. Ebony furniture is stored in a space called DD26. When artifacts are investigated, they briefly come off the shelf but then return to the shelf space, existing as one with the shelf in the depot.
During my investigation, for security and policy reasons, devices requiring additional power supply were prohibited, and the Internet was unavailable. Therefore, only basic devices like cell phones were allowed for capturing images.
The goal was not simply to capture a flat image but to reconstruct the object itself out of the depot, making reconstruction after scanning an essential process. This process, carried out under relatively poor conditions, naturally left distortions and voids in the reconstructed image. Additionally, images recognized as a single structure, like an iron shelf, were reshaped and reappeared in a melted and distorted manner.
These objects are not merely liberated images; they represent a depiction of the current reality in European society, where images of past colonial heritage are hidden in a room made of iron grids within a vertical depot space, stripping away the various contexts these objects possess. This extra work reveals the complexities and histories that these objects carry. Additionally, another main aim is to display this image to the public through the primary channel of the museum.
BK-1994-38, 2024, Mixed Media, 1370x820x1805(mm)BK-NM-11178, 2024, Mixed Media, 820x840x1590(mm)BK-1969-142, 2024, Mixed Media, 880x490x1040(mm)EV-DD, 2024, Mixed Media, 190x120x90(mm)Silver Key, 2024, Mixed Media, 220x100x30(mm)