Sonja van Kerkhoff (1960) born and raised in Aotearoa/New Zealand has lived in the Netherlands for the past 23 years. She works in diverse media from public sculptural works to performance.
Kāinga a roto (Home Within) is an art-system, consisting of five videos, with sounds, lights and shadows, and a physical space. This art-system is used to represent the complex system of a particular biography (growing up in Taranaki, New Zealand), using a visual language composed of references to the natural world (water in particular, but also earth, wind and bird life) influenced by Māori cultural values. Stories of traumatic childhood events (the artist's 'unwanted land') are woven throughout the soundpiece and video 'home'. When shown in the Netherlands, the outer/inner structure related to a boat-wharenui (New Zealand Māori Meeting house) while in Istanbul the outer and inner forms embodied a dialogue between Islamic and Maori architectures. "Waka Huia" (Feather Boat) is a feather-sized play on colonialization and extinction, and "Colonizing Oxford" was a 2 week series of performances and interventions which culminated in bringing bastardized and colonial forms of English into the heart of the city of Oxford.
Photos for Press Use
Kāinga a roto (Home Within), 2010-11
Shown at
ISEA ISTANBUL, 2011
Shown in the
Museum of Sculpture, Scheveningen, The Netherlands, 2010-11
Shown in the
Text, visuals and video clip on the ISEA Istanbul website, 2011
Waka Huia (Feather Boat), 2009-10
Shown at
Nothing to Declare, The Philippines, 2011
Colonizing Oxford, 2002,
2 weeks of 'exchange' in Oxford, U.K., 2002
The Gardeners, 2006
The interactive wall projection,
The Gardeners, functions as a device for play and reflection. The balls in the projection respond to the participant's presence, also projected in real-time on the wall. They are programmed to give the appearance of intelligent interaction. If you hold your hand out they will move towards it, but if you move too fast, they appear to be afraid and move away. If a person makes 'nesting places' with their body, the balls will nestle and grow. This encourages visitors to move slowly and treat the balls affectionately. If a participant keeps moving slowly for long enough, a snapshot of his or her face appears inside one of the balls, and it remains in the work until the next period of interaction. The participant has been trained by the work to adopt the 'right' stance and movement, and has now been accepted into it.
Greetings from Leiden, 2009
The performance,
"Greetings from Leiden" also touches on the themes of play, reflection and power relations. While herding origami elephants along the street or across the border dividing the Turkish-speaking part of Nicosia from the Greek-speaking part, I opened conversations with people, saying “I am herding elephants' or 'I am bringing greetings from Leiden.' Sometimes people engaged with me on issues such as the obvious border I was heading for and crossing, at other times they walked along the line of the elephants, treating them as objects for reflection, in the middle of a busy street.
Performances with paper boats, 2009
Location or relocation is another recurring theme. Two performances,
Sailing Home (#3) and
Colonizing Santa Monica involved a collection of paper boats made from pages of my children's schoolbooks. So these boats bore tell-tale signs of learning to write, and learning about the world, in Dutch. "Sailing Home" began at the entrance of the Whanganui City Art Gallery (New Zealand) and proceeded down the steps towards the city shopping centre. In this setting it came across as a poetic intervention, while in the busy Santa Monica promenade (in California) it was largely interpreted as a political act. This was partly because I had to constantly negotiate with the police and various security officers for permission to proceed and in part because I told people I was colonizing that part of Santa Monica.
Cross-pollination, 2007
The outdoor sculpture,
"Cross-pollination" made for an exhibition for the London Museum of Design and Architecture, displays various small souvenir items relating to intercultural contact: a plane, a model of Big Ben or a telephone box, in transparent plastic 'flowers.' The visitors walking back and forth from one to the other create a model of the process of cross-pollination. Consciously or not, they become the 'bees' in the metaphor.
