Exhibition | February – April 2025 | Nieuwe Vide (NL)

Featuring a combination of new and existing works by Elena Kostenko, Hannah Dawn Henderson and Kees van Leeuwen, Re-Viewing Sites of Preservation brought together a constellation of stories, each recollecting a distinct space: a defunct nuclear bunker, an archive, a garden, one’s body, a new country. Paradoxically enough, each of these structures can be understood as both a place of safety and hostility. For example, the harsh response of the body’s immune system, the strange calm found in a bunker deep underground, or ambiguous yet palpable dynamics of inclusion or exclusion in social settings.

Through our research on these structures, we came into contact with forms, motifs and images that provoked feelings of both estrangement and hyper-awareness. In each of the presented artworks, the process of preserving and sharing the experience of these structures was contemplated through material and narratives means, often touching on cultural and political legacies, vulnerability and resilience, and the role of abstraction as a way of coming to terms with challenging circumstances.

We sought to situate these sites alongside one another and ‘re-view’ them — re-staging them within the perimeter of the Nieuwe Vide’s exhibition space. In all of the works, the gesture of mediating the viewer’s gaze was key – gestures of concealment, exposure, enlargement, de-figuration and (dis)orientation were revisited and revised so as to create a greater awareness of the implications of one’s spectatorship.

All photographs are by Bogdan Bordeianu